The naval situation in Congress during the fall of 1775 and the winter of 1775-76 should be clearly understood. The debates and legislation of Congress concerning naval affairs are attached, as it were, to two threads. One thread, beginning with the appointment of a committee, on October 5, 1775, to prepare a plan for intercepting two British transports, has already been unraveled. The other, which had its origin in the introduction in Congress of the Rhode Island instructions, will now be followed. The delegates of Rhode Island to the Congress in the fall of 1775 were two sterling patriots, Samuel Ward and Stephen Hopkins. Each had been governor of Rhode Island, and each had grown old in the public service. Once bitter political rivals, they were now yoked together in the common cause of their state and country. On October 3, 1775, one of the Rhode Island delegates, presumably Samuel Ward, laid before Congress the instructions of his state in behalf of a Continental fleet. On this day the consideration of the instructions went over until the 6th, and on the 6th until the 7th.[90] When the Rhode Island instructions came up on October 7, a debate ensued, a synopsis of which has been left us by John Adams.[91] The discussion was participated in by Robert Treat Paine, Samuel Adams, and John Adams of Massachusetts, John Rutledge and Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, Samuel Chase of Maryland, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, Dr. John J. Zubly of Georgia, Eliphalet Dyer and Silas Deane of Connecticut, and Peyton Randolph of Virginia. When the debate took place, the consideration of the Rhode Island instructions had been postponed until the 16th, and the motion before the Congress was to appoint a committee “to consider the whole subject.” The establishing of a navy naturally found least favor among the members coming from the agricultural South, and most support from those of maritime New England. Chase, of Maryland, declared, “It is the maddest idea in the world to think of building an American fleet; its latitude is wonderful; we should mortgage the whole continent.” He added, however: “We should provide, for gaining intelligence, two swift sailing vessels.” Zubly, of Georgia, said: “If the plans of some gentlemen are to take place, an American fleet must be a part of it, extravagant as it is.” Gadsden, of South Carolina, temperately favored the procuring of armed vessels, thinking that it was “absolutely necessary that some plan of defence, by sea, should be adopted.” He was opposed to the “extensiveness of the Rhode Island plan,” although he thought that it should be considered. The friends of the navy acted on the defensive. They probably realized that their cause might well bide its time. Its opponents, to use John Adams’s phrase, were “lightly skirmishing.” In the end the motion was lost, and consideration of the instructions was deferred until the 16th.