During the American Revolution, Americans regularly attacked Nova Scotia by land and sea. American privateers devastated the maritime economy by raiding many of the coastal communities, such as the numerous raids on Liverpool and on Annapolis Royal.

The engagement between Jack and Observer was one of several in the region. On 10 July 1780, the British privateer brig Resolution (16 guns) under the command of Thomas Ross engaged the American privateer Viper (22 guns and 130 men) off Halifax at Sambro Light. In what one observer described as “one of the bloodiest battles in the history of privateering”, the two privateers began a “severe engagement” during which both pounded each other with cannon fire for about 90 minutes. The engagement resulted in the surrender of the British ship and the death of up to 18 British and 33 American sailors.

Jack herself was involved in a previous naval engagement. Jack (or Saucy Jack) was originally a Massachusetts privateer commissioned in September 1779. After three successful cruises in which she captured a number of prizes, HMS Pandora and HMS Danae captured her in July 1780 in the St. Lawrence River. The British took Jack into the Quebec Provincial Marine, though she was commissioned out of Nova Scotia. She then served as a patrol vessel for the fisheries and the St. Lawrence River. In an engagement off Cape Breton with two French frigates at Spanish River, near Cape Breton Island in 1781 two French frigates captured her. They took Jack back to Boston, where her previous owners purchased her and sent her to sea again as a privateer.

Observer was herself a former Massachusetts privateer, originally built as a merchantman, the Amsterdam, which HMS Amphitrite captured on 19 October 1781. The British sent Amsterdam into Halifax to be condemned as a prize, where the Royal Navy bought her.

Observer was returning to Halifax, having rescued from American privateer Noah Stoddard ten crew members of HMS Blonde after Blonde wrecked on Seal Island off Cape Sable Island. On 28 May 1782, as Observer arrived at the Sambro Island Light near the mouth of Halifax Harbour, Jack approached her. When Jack discovered her quarry was a British naval vessel, the Americans tried to escape.

Observer chased Jack for two hours before catching her. The ships were evenly matched. The British immediately killed the American captain David Ropes as a result of the cannon fire. Both ships had numerous holes shot through their sails, and the British sailors attempted to climb the rigging of their ship in an effort to board the American privateer. The Americans repulsed this initial boarding attempt, but the British were ultimately successful. Jack struck her colours on the afternoon of 29 May.

The USS Ranger was the first ship of the United States Navy to be designed and built from the keel up as an aircraft carrier. Ranger was a relatively small ship, closer in size and displacement to the first US carrier—Langley—than later ships. An island superstructure was not included in the original design, but was added after completion. Deemed too slow for use with the Pacific Fleet’s carrier task forces against Japan, the ship spent most of World War 2 in the Atlantic Ocean where the German fleet was a weaker opposition. Ranger saw combat in that theatre and provided air support for Operation Torch. In October 1943, she fought in Operation Leader, air attacks on German shipping off Norway. 

The Ranger was built between 1931-1934, she was in service from 1934 until 1946. She was armed with 8 × 5 in (127 mm)/25 calanti-aircraft guns 40 × .50 in (12.7 mm)machine guns. The Ranger could carry a maximum of 86 planes although normally carried 76. Her crew capacity was 216 officers and 2,245 enlisted men including embarked air group. With an average speed of 29.3 kn (33.7 mph; 54.3 km/h). In December 1941, she was returning to Norfolk from an ocean patrol extending to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Arriving in Norfolk on 8 December, she sailed on 21 December for patrol in the South Atlantic. She then entered the Norfolk Navy Yard for repairs on 21 March 1942. Ranger was one of 14 ships to receive the early RCA CXAM-1radar. Ranger served as flagship of Rear Admiral A. B. Cook, Commander, Carriers, Atlantic Fleet—until 6 April 1942, when he was relieved by Rear Admiral Ernest D. McWhorter, who also broke his flag in Ranger.

As the largest carrier in the Atlantic Fleet, Ranger led the task force that comprised herself and the four escort carriers. These provided air superiority during the amphibious invasion of Vichy-ruled French Morocco. On November 8th 1942, Allied landings in French North Africa (Operation Torch) began. Vichy French government forces attacked the Allied forces in defense of the neutrality of French Morocco, in what became known as the Naval Battle of Casablanca. On April 25th, 1943 German radio announced “Achtung! Achtung! We are proud to announce that a German submarine has sunk the United States aircraft carrier Ranger in the North Atlantic!” Following this broadcast, German news releases reported that Commander Otto von Bülow of the U-boat U-404, personally decorated by Adolf Hitler with Oak Leaves to the Knight´s Cross, had “in addition to torpedoing four steamers, caught and sank the American aircraft carrier Ranger.” The US Navy, concerned about the impact of the German announcement on families of Ranger crewmen, issued a denial of the German claim. Later she would be sent to Norway as part of operation leader. After that, the Ranger maintained transportation and training roles. she was sold for scrap to Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Chester, Pennsylvania on January 31st, 1947.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

Simplify, simplify.