Dozens of Rhode Islanders, gentlemen, sailors, businessmen, citizens, and patriots launched their longboats, under the cover of darkness, to apprehend Lt. Dudingston of the HMS Gaspee.  They quietly rowed themselves toward a hangman’s noose for each of them.  Shots were exchanged, the clash of arms, the seizing of the ship and crew were such an insult to the King, and to the Royal Navy, that the Crown’s magistrates threatened military occupation long before the fever of revolution swept the countryside.  The raid on the night of June 9, 1772, and its tenuous but clever cover-up became an epic expression of the emerging American spirit that, would later burst into the long and bloody revolution.