"perhaps the most ungracious duty that has ever fallen to the lot of a naval officer." According to his instructions, Graves was charged with supporting customs officials enforcing the various revenue and trade acts governing North American colonial trade within the empire, especially the Boston Port Act. With only 26 ships and over one-thousand miles of coastline from Nova Scotia to Florida to patrol, Graves's task was Sisyphean. Manning problems made the Royal Navy's problems even more acute, thus forcing it to resort to press gangs in order to supplement the ships' slender crews. Compounding the problem was the attitude and behavior of navy officers who did not recognize local authority and were more often contemptuous of local officials and sensitivities. Headquartered in Boston, Graves was at the center of the Revolutionary turmoil in New England. His sailors manned the boats that ferried British soldiers across the Charles River en route to Concord on the night of 18 April 1775. Two months later, on 17 June 1775, his sailors again helped ferry troops, this time to the Charlestown Peninsula, while several of his ships provided fire support for the pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill. During the Siege of Boston, Admiral Graves, on 6 October 1775, ordered Lieutenant Henry Mowatt, commanding the armed vessel , to destroy seaports that were supporting the rebellion. Mowatt burned Falmouth (today's Portland, Maine) on 18 October. Graves' position in Boston was tenuous; his relationship with General Gage was characterised by a strong mutual dislike which at the time was rumoured to at least partially result from a dispute between their wives Margaret Graves and Margaret Kemble Gage, who reportedly had fallen out over the question whether dancing should be allowed at a card-party or not. The trifling nature of their dispute aside, both women were staunch partisans of their husbands to the point that contemporaries mused both were "led", and thus presumably influenced in their capacities as military commanders, by their wives. Shortly before the Burning of Falmouth, in August 1775, Graves was involved in a public fistfight with Commissioner of Customs Benjamin Hallowell, the climax of an ongoing dispute between the two concerning the hay to be harvested on a small island off Boston. There are at least two accounts of the affair, one written by Hallowell himself addressed to General Gage and one by an anonymous eyewitness, published in a British newspaper. According