[2] For an account of the privateers of 1812, see The Old Merchant Marine, by Ralph D. Paine (in The Chronicles of America).
The American frigates which humbled the haughty Mistress of the Seas beyond all precedent were superior in speed and hitting power to anything of their class afloat. It detracts not at all from the glory they won to remember that in every instance they were larger and of better design and armament than the British frigates which they shot to pieces with such methodical accuracy.
When war was declared, the American Government was not quite clear as to what should be done with the navy. In New York harbor was a squadron of five ships under Commodore John Rodgers, including two of the heavier frigates or forty-fours, the President and the United States. Rodgers had also the lighter frigate Congress, the brig Argus, and the sloop Hornet. His orders were to look for British cruisers which were annoying commerce off Sandy Hook, chase them away, and then return to port for "further more extensive and particular orders." One hour after receiving these instructions the eager Rodgers put out to sea, with Captain Stephen Decatur as a squadron commander. The quarry was the frigate Belvidera, the most offensive of the British blockading force. This warship was sighted by the President and overtaken within forty-eight hours. An unlucky accident then occurred. Instead of running alongside, the President began firing at a distance and was hulling the enemy's stern when a gun on the forecastle burst, and killed or wounded sixteen American sailors. Commodore Rodgers was picked up with a broken leg. Meanwhile the Belvidera cast overboard her boats and anchors, emptied the fresh water barrels to better her sailing trim, and, crowding on every stitch of canvas, drew away and was lost to view. Rodgers then forgot his orders to return to New York and went off in search of the great convoy of British merchant vessels homeward bound from Jamaica, which was called the plate fleet. He sailed as far as the English Channel before quitting the chase and then cruised back to Boston.
Meanwhile Captain Isaac Hull of the Constitution had taken on a crew and stores at Annapolis and was bound up the coast to New York. Hull's luck appeared to be no better than Rodgers's. Off Barnegat he sailed almost into a strong British squadron, which had been sent from Halifax. The escape from this grave predicament was an exploit of seamanship which is among the treasured memories of the service. It was the beginning of the career of the Constitution, whose name is still the most illustrious on the American naval list and whose commanders, Hull and Bainbridge, are numbered among the great captains. It is a privilege to behold today, in the Boston Navy Yard, this gallant frigate preserved as a heritage, her tall masts and graceful yards soaring above the grim, gray citadels that we call battleships. True it is that a single modern shell would destroy this obsolete, archaic frigate which once swept the seas like a meteor, but the very image of her is still potent to thrill the hearts and animate the courage of an American seaman.
On that luckless July morning, at break of day, off the New Jersey coast, it seemed as though the Constitution would be flying British colors ere she had a chance to fight. On her leeward side stood two English frigates, the Guerrière and the Belvidera, with the Shannon only five miles astern, and the rest of the hostile fleet lifting topsails above the southern horizon.
Not a breath of wind stirred. Captain Hull called away his boats, and the sailors tugged at the oars, towing the Constitution very slowly ahead. Captain Broke of the Shannon promptly followed suit and signaled for all the boats of the squadron. In a long column they trailed at the end of the hawser; and the Shannon crept closer. Catspaws of wind ruffled the water, and first one ship and then the other gained a few hundred yards as upper tiers of canvas caught the faint impulse. The Shannon was a crack ship, and there was no better crew in the British navy, as Lawrence of the Chesapeake afterwards learned to his mortal sorrow. Gradually the Shannon cut down the intervening distance until she could make use of her bow guns.
At this Captain Hull resolved to try kedging his ship along, sending a boat half a mile ahead with a light anchor and all the spare rope on board. The crew walked the capstan round and hauled the ship up to the anchor, which they then lifted, carried ahead, and dropped again. The Constitution kept two kedges going all through that summer day, but the Shannon was playing the same game, and the two ships maintained their relative positions. They shot at each other at such long range that no damage was done. Before dusk the Guerrière caught a slant of breeze and worked nearer enough to bang away at the Constitution, which was, indeed, between the devil and the deep sea.
Night came on. The sailors, British and American, toiled until they dropped in their tracks, pulling at the kedge anchors and hawsers or bending to the sweeps of the cutters which towed at intervals and were exposed to the spatter of shot. It seemed impossible that the Constitution could slip clear of this pack of able frigates which trailed her like hounds. Toward midnight the fickle breeze awoke and wafted the ships along under studding sails and all the light cloths that were wont to arch skyward. For two hours the men slept on deck like logs while those on watch grunted at the pump-brakes and the hose wetted the canvas to make it draw better.
The breeze failed, however, and through the rest of the night it was kedge and tow again, the Shannon and the Guerrière hanging on doggedly, confident of taking their quarry. Another day dawned, hot and windless, and the situation was unchanged. Other British ships had crawled or drifted nearer, but the Constitution was always just beyond range of their heavy guns. We may imagine Isaac Hull striding across the poop and back again, ruddy, solid, composed, wearing a cocked hat and a gold-laced coat, lifting an eye aloft, or squinting through his brass telescope, while he damned the enemy in the hearty language of the sea. He was a nephew of General William Hull, but it would have been unfair to remind him of it.
Near sunset of the second day of this unique test of seamanship and endurance, a rain squall swept toward the Constitution and obscured the ocean. Just before the violent gust struck the ship her seamen scampered aloft and took in the upper sails. This was all that safety required, but, seeing a chance to trick the enemy, Hull ordered the lower sails double-reefed as though caught in a gale of wind. The British ships hastily imitated him before they should be overtaken in like manner and veered away from the chase. Veiled in the rain and dusk, the Constitution set all sail again and foamed at twelve knots on her course toward a port of refuge. Though two of the British frigates were in sight next morning, the Constitution left them far astern and reached Boston safely.
Seafaring New England was quick to recognize the merit of this escape. Even the Federalists, who opposed and hampered the war by land, were enthusiastic in praise of Captain Hull and his ship. They had outsailed and outwitted the best of the British men-of-war on the American coast, and a general feeling of hopelessness gave way to an ardent desire to try anew the ordeal of battle. With this spirit firing his officers and crew, Hull sailed again a few days later on a solitary cruise to the eastward with the intention of vexing the enemy's merchant trade and hopeful of finding a frigate willing to engage him in a duel. From Newfoundland he cruised south until a Salem privateer spoke him on the 18th of August and reported a British warship close by. The Constitution searched until the afternoon of the next day and then sighted her old friend, the Guerrière.
To retell the story of their fight in all the vanished sea lingo of that day would bewilder the land-man and prove tedious to those familiar with the subject. The boatswains piped the call, "all hands clear ship for action"; the fife and drum beat to quarters; and four hundred men stood by the tackles of the muzzle-loading guns with their clumsy wooden carriages, or climbed into the tops to use their muskets or trim sail. Decks were sanded to prevent slipping when blood flowed. Boys ran about stacking the sacks of powder or distributing buckets of pistols ready for the boarding parties. And against the masts the cutlasses and pikes stood ready.
Captain John Dacres of the ill-fated Guerrière was an English gentleman as well as a gallant officer. But he did not know his antagonist. Like his comrades of the service he had failed to grasp the fact that the Constitution and the other American frigates of her class were the most formidable craft afloat, barring ships of the line, and that they were to revolutionize the design of war-vessels for half a century thereafter. They were frigates, or cruisers, in that they carried guns on two decks, but the main battery of long twenty-four-pound guns was an innovation, and the timbers and planking were stouter than had ever been built into ships of the kind. So stout, indeed, were the sides that shot rebounded from them more than once and thus gave the Constitution the affectionate nickname of "Old Ironsides."
Sublimely indifferent to these odds, Captain Dacres had already sent a challenge, with his compliments, to Commodore Rodgers of the United States frigate President, saying that he would be very happy to meet him or any other American frigate of equal force, off Sandy Hook, "for the purpose of having a few minutes' tête-à-tête." It was therefore with the utmost willingness that the Constitution and the Guerrière hoisted their battle ensigns and approached each other warily for an hour while they played at long bowls, as was the custom, each hoping to disable the other's spars or rigging and so gain the advantage of movement. Finding this sort of action inconclusive, however, Hull set more sail and ran down to argue it with broadsides, coolly biding his time, although Morris, his lieutenant, came running up again and again to beg him to begin firing. Men were being killed beside their guns as they stood ready to jerk the lock strings. The two ships were abreast of each other and no more than a few yards apart before the Constitution returned the cannonade that thundered from every gun port of her adversary.
Within ten minutes the Guerrière's mizzenmast was knocked over the side and her hull was shattered by the accurate fire of the Yankee gunners, who were trained to shoot on the downward roll of their ship and so smash below the water line. Almost unhurt, the Constitution moved ahead and fearfully raked the enemy's deck before the ships fouled each other. They drifted apart before the boarders could undertake their bloody business, and then the remaining masts of the British frigate toppled overside and she was a helpless wreck. Seventy-nine of her crew were dead or wounded and the ship was sinking beneath their feet. Captain Isaac Hull could truthfully report: "In less than thirty minutes from the time we got alongside of the enemy she was left without a spar standing, and the hull cut to pieces in such a manner as to make it difficult to keep her above water."
Captain Dacres struck his flag, and the American sailors who went aboard found the guns dismounted, the dead and dying scattered amid a wild tangle of spars and rigging, and great holes blown through the sides and decks. The Constitution had suffered such trifling injury that she was fit and ready for action a few hours later. Of her crew only seven men were killed and the same number hurt. She was the larger ship, and the odds in her favor were as ten to seven, reckoned in men and guns, for which reasons Captain Hull ought to have won. The significance of his victory was that at every point he had excelled a British frigate and had literally blown her out of the water. His crew had been together only five weeks and could fairly be called green while the Guerrière, although short-handed, had a complement of veteran tars. The British navy had never hesitated to engage hostile men-of-war of superior force and had usually beaten them. Of two hundred fights between single ships, against French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Danish, and Dutch, the English had lost only five. The belief of Captain Dacres that he could beat the Constitution was therefore neither rash nor ill-founded.
The English captain had ten Americans in his crew, but he would not compel them to fight against their countrymen and sent them below, although he sorely needed every man who could haul at a gun-tackle or lay out on a yard. Wounded though he was and heartbroken by the disaster, his chivalry was faultless, and he took pains to report: "I feel it my duty to state that the conduct of Captain Hull and his officers toward our men has been that of a brave and generous enemy, the greatest care being taken to prevent our men losing the smallest trifle and the greatest attention being paid to the wounded."
When the Englishman was climbing up the side of the Constitution as a prisoner, Isaac Hull ran to help him, exclaiming, "Give me your hand, Dacres. I know you are hurt." No wonder that these two captains became fast friends. It is because sea warfare abounds in such manly incidents as these that the modern naval code of Germany, as exemplified in the acts of her submarine commanders, was so peculiarly barbarous and repellent.
On board the Guerrière was Captain William B. Orne, of the Salem merchant brig Betsy, which had been taken as a prize. His story of the combat is not widely known and seems worth quoting in part:
At two P.M. we discovered a large sail to windward bearing about north from us. We soon made her out to be a frigate. She was steering off from the wind, with her head to the southwest, evidently with the intention of cutting us off as soon as possible. Signals were soon made by the Guerrière, but as they were not answered the conclusion was, of course, that she was either a French or American frigate. Captain Dacres appeared anxious to ascertain her character and after looking at her for that purpose, handed me his spyglass, requesting me to give him my opinion of the stranger. I soon saw from the peculiarity of her sails and from her general appearance that she was, without doubt, an American frigate, and communicated the same to Captain Dacres. He immediately replied that he thought she came down too boldly for an American, but soon after added, "The better he behaves, the more honor we shall gain by taking him."
When the strange frigate came down to within two or three miles' distance, he hauled upon the wind, took in all his light sails, reefed his topsails, and deliberately prepared for action. It was now about five o'clock in the afternoon when he filled away and ran down for the Guerrière. At this moment Captain Dacres politely said to me: "Captain Orne, as I suppose you do not wish to fight against your own countrymen, you are at liberty to go below the water-line." It was not long after this before I retired from the quarter-deck to the cock-pit; of course I saw no more of the action until the firing ceased, but I heard and felt much of its effects; for soon after I left the deck the firing commenced on board the Guerrière, and was kept up almost incessantly until about six o'clock when I heard a tremendous explosion from the opposing frigate. The effect of her shot seemed to make the Guerrière reel and tremble as though she had received the shock of an earthquake.
Immediately after this, I heard a tremendous crash on deck and was told that the mizzen-mast was shot away. In a few moments afterward, the cock-pit was filled with wounded men. After the firing had ceased I went on deck and there beheld a scene which it would be difficult to describe: all the Guerrière's masts were shot away and, as she had no sails to steady her, she lay rolling like a log in the trough of the sea. Many of the men were employed in throwing the dead overboard. The decks had the appearance of a butcher's slaughter-house; the gun tackles were not made fast and several of the guns got loose and were surging from one side to the other.
Some of the petty officers and seamen, after the action, got liquor and were intoxicated; and what with the groans of the wounded, the noise and confusion of the enraged survivors of the ill-fated ship rendered the whole scene a perfect hell.
Setting the hulk of the Guerrière on fire, Captain Hull sailed for Boston with the captured crew. The tidings he bore were enough to amaze an American people which expected nothing of its navy, which allowed its merchant ships to rot at the wharves, and which regarded the operations of its armies with the gloomiest forebodings. New England went wild with joy over a victory so peculiarly its own. Captain Hull and his officers were paraded up State Street to a banquet at Faneuil Hall while cheering thousands lined the sidewalks. A few days earlier had come the news of the surrender of Detroit, but the gloom was now dispelled. Americans could fight, after all. Popular toasts of the day were:
OUR INFANT NAVY—We must nurture the young Hercules in his cradle, if we mean to profit by the labors of his manhood.
THE VICTORY WE CELEBRATE—An invaluable proof that we are able to defend our rights on the ocean.
Handbills spread the news through the country, and artillery salutes proclaimed it from Carolina to the Wabash. Congress voted fifty thousand dollars as prize money to the heroes of the Constitution and medals to her officers. The people of New York gave them swords, and Captain Hull and Lieutenant Morris received pieces of plate from the patriots of Philadelphia. Federalists laid aside for the moment their opposition to the war and proclaimed that their party had founded and supported the navy. The moral effect of the victory was out of all proportion to its strategic importance. It was like sunshine breaking through a fog. Such rejoicing had been unknown, even in the decisive moments of the War of the Revolution. It served to show how deep-seated had been the American conviction that Britain's mastery of the sea was like a spell which could not be broken.
COMMODORE STEPHEN DECATUR
Painting by Thomas Sully, 1811. In the Comptroller's Office, owned by the City of New York.
"CONSTITUTION" AND "GUERRIÈRE"
An old print, illustrating the moment in the action at which the mainmast of the Guerrière, shattered by the terrific fire of the American frigate, fell overside, transforming the former vessel into a floating wreck and terminating the action. The picture represents accurately the surprisingly slight damage done the Constitution; note the broken spanker gaff and the shot holes in her topsails.
It was soon made clear that the impressive victory over the Guerrière was neither a lucky accident nor the result of prowess peculiar to the Constitution and her crew. Ship for ship, the American navy was better than the British. This is a truth which was demonstrated with sensational emphasis by one engagement after another. During the first eight months of the war there were five such duels, and in every instance the enemy was compelled to strike his colors. In tavern and banquet hall revelers were still drinking the health of Captain Isaac Hull when the thrilling word came that the Wasp, an eighteen-gun ship or sloop, as the type was called in naval parlance, had beaten the Frolic in a rare fight. The antagonists were so evenly matched in every respect that there was no room for excuses, and on both sides were displayed such stubborn hardihood and a seamanship so dauntless as to make an Anglo-Saxon proud that these foemen were bred of a common stock.
The Wasp had sailed from the Delaware on the 13th of October, heading southeast to look for British merchantmen in the West India track. Her commander was Captain Jacob Jones, a name revived in modern days by a destroyer of the Queenstown fleet in the arduous warfare against the German submarines. Shattered by a torpedo, the Jacob Jones sank in seven minutes, and sixty-four of the officers and crew perished, doing their duty to the last, disciplined, unafraid, so proving themselves worthy of the American naval service and of the memory of the unflinching captain of 1812.
The little Wasp ran into a terrific gale which blew her sails away and washed men overboard. But she made repairs and stood bravely after a British convoy which was escorted by the eighteen-gun brig Frolic, Captain Thomas Whinyates. The Frolic, too, had been battered by the weather, and the cargo ships had been scattered far and wide. The Wasp sighted several of them in the moonlight but, fearing they might be war vessels, followed warily until morning revealed on her leeward side the Frolic. Jacob Jones promptly shortened sail, which was the nautical method of rolling up one's sleeves, and steered close to attack.
It seemed preposterous to try to fight while the seas were still monstrously swollen and their crests were breaking across the decks of these vessels of less than five hundred tons burden. Wildly they rolled and pitched, burying their bows in the roaring combers. The merchant ships which watched this audacious defiance of wind and wave were having all they could do to avoid being swept or dismasted. Side by side wallowed Wasp and Frolic, sixty yards between them, while the cannon rolled their muzzles under water and the gunners were blinded with spray. Britisher and Yank, each crew could hear the hearty cheers of the other as they watched the chance to ply rammer and sponge and fire when the deck lifted clear of the sea.
Somehow the Wasp managed to shoot straight and fast. They were of the true webfooted breed in this hard-driven sloop-of-war, but there were no fair-weather mariners aboard the Frolic, and they hit the target much too often for comfort. Within ten minutes they had saved Captain Jacob Jones the trouble of handling sail, for they shot away his upper masts and yards and most of his rigging. The Wasp was a wreck aloft but the Frolic had suffered more vitally, for as usual the American gun captains aimed for the deck and hull; and they had been carefully drilled at target practice. The British sailors suffered frightfully from this storm of grape and chain shot, but those who were left alive still fought inflexibly. It looked as though the Frolic might get away, for the masts of the Wasp were in danger of tumbling over the side. With this mischance in mind, Captain Jacob Jones shifted helm and closed in for a hand-to-hand finish.
For a few minutes the two ships plunged ahead so near each other that the rammers of the American sailors struck the side of the Frolic as they drove the shot down the throats of their guns. It was literally muzzle to muzzle. Then they crashed together and the Wasp's jib-boom was thrust between the Frolic's masts. In this position the British decks were raked by a murderous fire as Jacob Jones trumpeted the order, "Boarders away!" Jack Lang, a sailor from New Jersey, scrambled out on the bowsprit, cutlass in his fist, without waiting to see if his comrades were with him, and dropped to the forecastle of the Frolic. Lieutenant Biddle tried it by jumping on the bulwark and climbing to the other ship as they crashed together on the next heave of the sea, but a doughty midshipman, seeking a handy purchase, grabbed him by the coat tails and they fell back upon their own deck. Another attempt and Biddle joined Jack Lang by way of the bowsprit. These two thus captured the Frolic, for as they dashed aft the only living men on deck were the undaunted sailor at the wheel and three officers, including Captain Whinyates and Lieutenant Wintle, who were so severely wounded that they could not stand without support. They tottered forward and surrendered their swords, and Lieutenant Biddle then leaped into the rigging and hauled the British ensign down.
Of the Frolic's crew of one hundred and ten men only twenty were unhurt, and these had fled below to escape the dreadful fire from the Wasp. The gun deck was strewn with bodies, and the waves which broke over the ship swirled them to and fro, the dead and the wounded together. Not an officer had escaped death or injury. The Wasp was more or less of a tangle aloft but her hull was sound and only five of her men had been killed and five wounded. No sailors could have fought more bravely than Captain Whinyates and his British crew, but they had been overwhelmed in three-quarters of an hour by greater skill, coolness, and judgment.
No sea battle of the war was more brilliant than this, but Captain Jacob Jones was delayed in sailing home to receive the plaudits due him. His prize crew was aboard the Frolic, cleaning up the horrid mess and fitting the beaten ship for the voyage to Charleston, and the Wasp was standing by when there loomed in sight a towering three-decker—a British ship of the line—the Poictiers. The Wasp shook out her sails to make a run for it, but they had been cut to ribbons and she was soon overhauled. Now an eighteen-gun ship could not argue with a majestic seventy-four. Captain Jacob Jones submitted with as much grace as he could muster, and Wasp and Frolic were carried to Bermuda. The American crew was soon exchanged, and Congress applied balm to the injured feelings of these fine sailormen by filling their pockets to the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars in prize money.
It was only a week later that the navy vouchsafed an encore to a delighted nation. This time the sport royal was played between stately frigates. On the 8th of October Commodore Rodgers had taken his squadron out of Boston for a second cruise. After four days at sea the United States was detached, and Captain Stephen Decatur ranged off to the eastward in quest of diversion. A fortnight of monotony was ended by a strange sail which proved to be the British thirty-eight-gun frigate Macedonian, newly built. Her commander, Captain Carden, had the highest opinion of his ship and crew, and one of his officers testified that "the state of discipline on board was excellent; in no British ship was more attention paid to gunnery. Before this cruise the ship had been engaged almost every day with the enemy; and in time of peace the crew were constantly exercised at the great guns."
The United States was a sister frigate of the Constitution, built from the same designs and therefore more formidable than her British opponent as three is to two. Captain Carden had no misgivings, however, and instantly set out in chase of the American frigate. But he was unfortunate enough to pit himself against one of the ablest officers afloat, and his own talent was mediocre. The result was partly determined by this personal equation in an action in which the Macedonian was outgeneraled as well as outfought. And again gunnery was a decisive factor. Observers said that the broadsides of the United States flamed with such rapidity that the ship looked as though she were on fire.
Early in the fight Captain Carden bungled an opportunity to pass close ahead of the United States and so rake her with a destructive attack. Then rashly coming to close quarters, the Macedonian was swept by the heavy guns of the American frigate and reduced to wreckage in ninety minutes. The weather was favorable for the Yankee gun crews, and the war offered no more dramatic proof of their superbly intelligent training. The Macedonian had received more than one hundred shot in her hull, several below the water line, one mast had been cut in two, and the others were useless. More than a hundred of her officers and men were dead or injured. The United States was almost undamaged, a few ropes and small spars were shot away, and only twelve of her men were on the casualty list. Captain Decatur rightfully boasted that he had as fine a crew as ever walked a deck, American sailors who had been schooled for the task with the greatest care. English opinion went so far as to concede this much: "As a display of courage the character of our service was nobly upheld, but we would be deceiving ourselves were we to admit that the comparative expertness of the crews in gunnery was equally satisfactory. Now taking the difference of effect as given by Captain Carden, we must draw this conclusion—that the comparative loss in killed and wounded, together with the dreadful account he gives of the condition of his own ship, while he admits that the enemy's vessel was in comparatively good order, must have arisen from inferiority in gunnery as well as in force."
Decatur sent the Macedonian to Newport as a trophy of war and forwarded her battle flag to Washington. It arrived just when a great naval ball was in progress to celebrate the capture of the Guerrière, whose ensign was already displayed from the wall. It was a great moment for the young lieutenant of the United States, who had been assigned this duty, when he announced his mission and, amid the cheers of the President, the Cabinet, and other distinguished guests, proudly exhibited the flag of another British frigate to decorate the ballroom!
Meanwhile the Constitution had returned to sea to spread her royals to the South Atlantic trades and hunt for lumbering British East-Indiamen. Captain Isaac Hull had gracefully given up the command in favor of Captain William Bainbridge, who was one of the oldest and most respected officers of his rank and who deserved an opportunity to win distinction. Bainbridge had behaved heroically at Tripoli and was logically in line to take over one of the crack frigates. The sailors of the Constitution grumbled a bit at losing Isaac Hull but soon regained their alert and willing spirit as they comprehended that they had another first-rate "old man" in William Bainbridge. Henry Adams has pointed out that the average age of Bainbridge, Hull, Rodgers, and Decatur was thirty-seven, while that of the four generals most conspicuous in the disappointments of the army, Dearborn, Wilkinson, William Hull, and Wade Hampton, was fifty-eight. The difference is notable and is mentioned for what it may be worth.
Through the autumn of 1812 the frigate cruised beneath tropic suns, much of the time off the coast of Brazil. Today the health and comfort of the bluejacket are so scrupulously provided for in every possible way that a battleship is the standard of perfection for efficiency in organization. It is amazing that in such a ship as the Constitution four hundred men could be cheerful and ready to fight after weeks and even months at sea. They were crowded below the water line, without proper heat, plumbing, lighting, or ventilation, each man being allowed only twenty-eight inches by eight feet of space in which to sling his hammock against the beams overhead. Scurvy and other diseases were rampant. As many as seventy of the crew of the Constitution were on the sick list shortly before she fought the Guerrière. The food was wholesome for rugged men, but it was limited solely to salt beef, hard bread, dried peas, cheese, pork, and spirits.
Such conditions, however, had not destroyed the vigor of those hardy seamen of the Constitution when, on the 29th of December and within sight of the Brazilian coast, the lookout at the masthead sang out to Captain Bainbridge that a heavy ship was coming up under easy canvas. It turned out to be His Britannic Majesty's frigate Java, Captain Henry Lambert, who, like Carden, made the mistake of insisting upon a combat. His reasons were sounder than those of Dacres or Carden, however, for the Java was only a shade inferior to the Constitution in guns and carried as many men. In every respect they were so evenly matched that the test of battle could have no aftermath of extenuation.
The Java at once hastened in pursuit of the American ship which drew off the coast as though in flight, the real purpose being to get clear of the neutral Brazilian waters. The Constitution must have been a picture to stir the heart and kindle the imagination, her black hull heeling to the pressure of the tall canvas, the long rows of guns frowning from the open ports, while her bunting rippled a glorious defiance, with a commodore's pennant at the mainmast-head, the Stars and Stripes streaming from the mizzen peak and main-topgallant mast, and a Union Jack at the fore. The Java was adorned as bravely, and Captain Lambert had lashed an ensign in the rigging on the chance that his other colors might be shot away.
The two ships began the fray at what they called long range, which would be about a mile, and then swept onward to pass on opposite tacks. It was the favorite maneuver of trying to gain the weather gage, and while they were edging to windward a round shot smashed the wheel of the Constitution which so hampered her for the moment that Captain Lambert, handsomely taking advantage of the mishap, let the Java run past his enemy's stern and poured in a broadside which hit several of the American seamen. Both commanders displayed, in a high degree, the art of handling ships under sail as they luffed or wore and tenaciously jockeyed for position, while the gunners fought in the smoke that drifted between the frigates.
At length Captain Lambert became convinced that he had met his master at this agile style of warfare and determined to come to close quarters before the Java was fatally damaged. Her masts and yards were crashing to the deck and the slaughter among the crew was already appalling. Marines and seamen gathered in the gangways and upon the forecastle head to spring aboard the Constitution, but Captain Bainbridge drove his ship clear very shortly after the collision and continued to pound the Java to kindling-wood with his broadsides. The fate of the action was no longer in doubt. The British frigate was on fire, Captain Lambert was mortally wounded, and all her guns had been silenced. The Constitution hauled off to repair damages and stood back an hour later to administer the final blow. But the flag of the Java fluttered down, and the lieutenant in command surrendered.
The Constitution had again crushed the enemy with so little damage to herself that she was ready to continue her cruise, with a loss of only nine killed and twenty-five wounded. The Java was a fine ship utterly destroyed, a sinking, dismasted hulk, with a hundred and twenty-four of her men dead or suffering from wounds. It is significant to learn that during six weeks at sea they had fired but six practice broadsides, of blank cartridges, although there were many raw hands in the crew, while the men of the Constitution had been incessantly drilled in firing until their team play was like that of a football eleven. There was no shooting at random. Under Hull and Bainbridge they had been taught their trade, which was to lay the gun on the target and shoot as rapidly as possible.
For the diminutive American navy, the year of 1812 came to its close with a record of success so illustrious as to seem almost incredible. It is more dignified to refrain from extolling our own exploits and to recall the effects of these sea duels upon the minds of the people, the statesmen, and the press of the England of that period. Their outbursts of wrathful humiliation were those of a maritime race which cared little or nothing about the course of the American war by land. Theirs was the salty tradition, virile and perpetual, which a century later and in a friendlier guise was to create a Grand Fleet which should keep watch and ward in the misty Orkneys and hold the Seven Seas safe against the naval power of Imperial Germany. Then, as now, the English nation believed that its armed ships were its salvation.
It is easier to understand, bearing this in mind, why after the fight of the Guerrière the London Times indulged in such frenzied lamentations as these:
We witnessed the gloom which that event cast over high and honorable minds. . . . Never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American, and though we cannot say that Captain Dacres, under all circumstances, is punishable for this act, yet we do say there are commanders in the English navy who would a thousand times rather have gone down with their colors flying than to have set their fellow sailors so fatal an example.
Good God! that a few short months should have so altered the tone of British sentiments! Is it true, or is it not, that our navy was accustomed to hold the Americans in utter contempt? Is it true, or is it not, that the Guerrière sailed up and down the American coast with her name painted in large characters on her sails in boyish defiance of Commodore Rodgers? Would any captain, however young, have indulged such a foolish piece of vain-boasting if he had not been carried forward by the almost unanimous feeling of his associates?
We have since sent out more line-of-battle ships and heavier frigates. Surely we must now mean to smother the American navy. A very short time before the capture of the Guerrière an American frigate was an object of ridicule to our honest tars. Now the prejudice is actually setting the other way and great pains seems to be taken by the friends of ministers to prepare the public for the surrender of a British seventy-four to an opponent lately so much contemned.
It was when the news reached England that the Java had been destroyed by the Constitution that indignation found a climax in the outcry of the Pilot, a foremost naval authority:
The public will learn, with sentiments which we shall not presume to anticipate, that a third British frigate has struck to an American. This is an occurrence that calls for serious reflection,—this, and the fact stated in our paper of yesterday, that Lloyd's list contains notices of upwards of five hundred British vessels captured in seven months by the Americans. Five hundred merchantmen and three frigates! Can these statements be true; and can the English people hear them unmoved? Any one who would have predicted such a result of an American war this time last year would have been treated as a madman or a traitor. He would have been told, if his opponents had condescended to argue with him, that long ere seven months had elapsed the American flag would have been swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and their maritime arsenals rendered a heap of ruins. Yet down to this moment not a single American frigate has struck her flag. They insult and laugh at our want of enterprise and vigor. They leave their ports when they please and return to them when it suits their convenience; they traverse the Atlantic; they beset the West India Islands; they advance to the very chops of the Channel; they parade along the coasts of South America; nothing chases, nothing intercepts, nothing engages them but to yield them triumph.
It was to be taken for granted that England would do something more than scold about the audacity of the American navy. Even after the declaration of war her most influential men hoped that the repeal of the obnoxious Orders-in-Council might yet avert a solution of the American problem by means of the sword. There was hesitation to apply the utmost military and naval pressure, and New England was regarded with feelings almost friendly because of its opposition to an offensive warfare against Great Britain and an invasion of Canada.
Absorbed in the greater issue against Napoleon, England was nevertheless aroused to more vigorous action against the United States and devised strong blockading measures for the spring of 1813. Unable to operate against the enemy's ships in force or to escape from ports which were sealed by vigilant squadrons, the American navy to a large extent was condemned to inactivity for the remainder of the war. Occasional actions were fought and merit was justly won, but there was nothing like the glory of 1812, which shone undimmed by defeat and which gave to the annals of the nation one of its great chapters of heroic and masterful achievement. It was singularly apt that the noble and victorious American frigates should have been called the Constitution and the United States. They inspired a new respect for the flag with the stripes and the stars and for all that it symbolized.
WILLIAM BAINBRIDGE
Painting by J. W. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the Corporation.
ISAAC HULL
Painting by J. W. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the Corporation.
The second year of the war by sea opened brilliantly enough to satisfy the American people, who were now in a mood to expect too much of their navy. In February the story of the Wasp and the Frolic was repeated by two ships of precisely the same class. The American sloop-of-war Hornet had sailed to South America with the Constitution and was detached to blockade, in the port of Bahia, the British naval sloop Bonne Citoyenne, which contained treasure to the amount of half a million pounds in specie. Captain James Lawrence of the Hornet sent in a challenge to fight, ship against ship, pledging his word that the Constitution would not interfere, but the British commander, perhaps mindful of his precious cargo, declined the invitation. Instead of this, he sensibly sent word to a great seventy-four at Rio de Janeiro, begging her to come and drive the pestiferous Hornet away.
The British battleship arrived so suddenly that Captain Lawrence was compelled to dodge and flee in the darkness. By a close shave he gained the open sea and made off up the coast. For several weeks the Hornet idled to and fro, vainly seeking merchant prizes, and then off the Demerara River on February 24, 1813, she fell in with the British brig Peacock, that flew the royal ensign. The affair lasted no more than fifteen minutes. The Peacock was famous for shining brass work, spotless paint, and the immaculate trimness of a yacht, but her gunnery had been neglected, for which reason she went to the bottom in six fathoms of water with shot-holes in her hull and thirty-seven of her crew put out of action. The sting of the Hornet had been prompt and fatal. Captain Lawrence had only one man killed and two wounded, and his ship was as good as ever. Crowding his prisoners on board and being short of provisions and water, he set sail for a home port and anchored in New York harbor. He was in time to share with Bainbridge the carnival of salutes, processions, dinners, addresses of congratulation, votes of thanks, swords, medals, prize money, promotion—every possible tribute of an adoring and grateful people.
One of the awards bestowed upon Lawrence was the command of the frigate Chesapeake. Among seamen she was rated an unlucky ship, and Lawrence was confidently expected to break the spell. Her old crew had left her after the latest voyage, which met with no success, and other sailors were reluctant to join her. Privateering had attracted many of them, and the navy was finding it difficult to recruit the kind of men it desired. Lawrence was compelled to sign on a scratch lot, some Portuguese, a few British, and many landlubbers. Given time to shake them together in hard service at sea, he would have made a smart crew of them no doubt, as Isaac Hull had done in five weeks with the men of the Constitution, but destiny ordered otherwise.
In the spring of 1813 the harbor of Boston was blockaded by the thirty-eight-gun British frigate Shannon, Captain Philip Vere Broke, who had been in this ship for seven years. In the opinion of Captain Mahan, "his was one of those cases where singular merit as an officer and an attention to duty altogether exceptional had not yet obtained opportunity for distinction. It would probably be safe to say that no more thoroughly efficient ship of her class had been seen in the British navy during the twenty years' war with France."
Captain Broke was justly confident in his own leadership and in the efficiency of a ship's company, which had retained its identity of organization through so many years of his personal and energetic supervision. Indeed, the captain of the British flagship on the American station wrote: "The Shannon's men were trained and understood gunnery better than any men I ever saw." Every morning the men were exercised at training the guns and in the afternoon in the use of the broadsword, musket, and pike. Twice each week the crew fired at targets with great guns and musketry and the sailor who hit the bull's eye received a pound of tobacco. Without warning Captain Broke would order a cask tossed overboard and then suddenly order some particular gun to sink it. In brief, the Shannon possessed those qualities which had been notable in the victorious American frigates and which were lamentably deficient in the Chesapeake.
Lawrence's men were unknown to each other and to their officers, and they had never been to sea together. The last draft came aboard, in fact, just as the anchor was weighed and the Chesapeake stood out to meet her doom. Even most of her officers were new to the ship. They had no chance whatever to train or handle the rabble between decks. Now Captain Broke had been anxious to fight this American frigate as matching the Shannon in size and power. He had already addressed to Captain Lawrence a challenge whose wording was a model of courtesy but which was provocative to the last degree. A sailor of Lawrence's heroic temper was unlikely to avoid such a combat, stimulated as he was by the unbroken success of his own navy in duels between frigates.
On the first day of June, Captain Broke boldly ran into Boston harbor and broke out his flag in defiance of the Chesapeake which was riding at anchor as though waiting to go to sea. Instantly accepting the invitation, Captain Lawrence hoisted colors, fired a gun, and mustered his crew. In this ceremonious fashion, as gentlemen were wont to meet with pistols to dispute some point of honor, did the Chesapeake sail out to fight the waiting Shannon. The news spread fast and wide and thousands of people, as though they were bound to the theater, hastened to the heights of Malden, to Nahant, and to the headlands of Salem and Marblehead, in hopes of witnessing this famous sight. They assumed that victory was inevitable. Any other surmise was preposterous.
These eager crowds were cheated of the spectacle, however, for the Chesapeake bore away to the eastward after rounding Boston Light and dropped hull down until her sails were lost in the summer haze, with the Shannon in her company as if they steered for some rendezvous. They were firing when last seen and the wind bore the echo of the guns, faint and far away. It was most extraordinary that three weeks passed before the people would believe the tidings of the disaster. A pilot who had left the Chesapeake at five o'clock in the afternoon reported that he was still near enough an hour later to see the two ships locked side by side, that a fearful explosion had happened aboard the Chesapeake, and that through a rift in the battle smoke he had beheld the British flag flying above the American frigate.
This report was confirmed by a fishing boat from Cape Ann and by the passengers in a coastwise packet, but the public doubted and still hoped until the newspapers came from Halifax with an account of the arrival of the Chesapeake as prize to the Shannon and of the funeral honors paid to the body of Captain James Lawrence. The tragic defeat came at an extremely dark moment of the war when almost every expectation had been disappointed and the future was clouded. Richard Rush, the American diplomatist, wrote, recalling the event:
I remember—what American does not!—the first rumor of it. I remember the startling sensation. I remember at first the universal incredulity. I remember how the post-offices were thronged for successive days by anxious thousands; how collections of citizens rode out for miles on the highway, accosting the mail to catch something by anticipation. At last, when the certainty was known, I remember the public gloom; funeral orations and badges of mourning bespoke it. "Don't give up the ship"—the dying words of Lawrence—were on every tongue.
It was learned that the Chesapeake had followed the Shannon until five o'clock, when the latter luffed and showed her readiness to begin fighting. Lawrence was given the choice of position, with a westerly breeze, but he threw away this advantage, preferring to trust to his guns with a green crew rather than the complex and delicate business of maneuvering his ship under sail. He came bowling straight down at the Shannon, luffed in his turn, and engaged her at a distance of fifty yards. The breeze was strong and the nimble American frigate forged ahead more rapidly than Lawrence expected, so that presently her broadside guns had ceased to bear.
While Lawrence was trying to slacken headway and regain the desired position, the enemy's shot disabled his headsails, and the Chesapeake came up into the wind with canvas all a-flutter. It was a mishap which a crew of trained seamen might have quickly mended, but the frigate was taken aback—that is, the breeze drove her stern foremost toward the Shannon and exposed her to a deadly cannonade which the American gunners were unable to return. The hope of salvation lay in getting the ship under way again or in boarding the Shannon. It was in this moment that the battle was won and lost, for every gun of the British broadside was sweeping the American deck diagonally from stern to bow, while the marines in the tops of the Shannon picked off the officers and seamen of the Chesapeake, riddling them with musket balls. It was like the swift blast of a hurricane. Lawrence fell, mortally wounded. Ludlow, his first lieutenant, was carried below. The second lieutenant was stationed between decks, and the third forsook his post to assist those who were carrying Lawrence below to the gun deck. Not an officer remained on the spar deck and not a living man was left on the quarter deck when the Chesapeake drifted against the Shannon after four minutes of this infernal destruction. As the ships collided, Captain Broke dashed forward and shouted for boarders, leading them across to the American deck. No more than fifty men followed him and three hundred Yankee sailors should have been able to wipe the party out, but most of the Chesapeake crew were below, and, demoralized by lack of discipline and leadership, they refused to come up and stand the gaff. Brave resistance was made by the few who remained on deck and a dozen more followed the second lieutenant, George Budd, as he rushed up to rally a forlorn hope.
It was a desperate encounter while it lasted, and Captain Broke was slashed by a saber as he led a charge to clear the forecastle. Yet two minutes sufficed to clear the decks of the Chesapeake, and the few visible survivors were thrown down the hatchways. The guns ceased firing, and the crew below sent up a message of surrender. The frigates had drifted apart, leaving Broke and his seamen to fight without reinforcement, but before they came together again the day was won. This was the most humiliating phase of the episode, that a handful of British sailors and marines should have carried an American frigate by boarding.
It must not be inferred that the Chesapeake inflicted no damage during the fifteen minutes of this famous engagement. Thirty-seven of the British boarding party were killed or wounded and the American marines—"leather-necks" then and "devil-dogs" now—fought in accordance with the spirit of a corps which had won its first laurels in the Revolution. Such broadsides as the Chesapeake was able to deliver were accurately placed and inflicted heavy losses. The victory cost the Shannon eighty-two men killed and wounded, while the American frigate lost one hundred and forty-seven of her crew, or more than one-third of her complement. Even in defeat the Chesapeake had punished the enemy far more severely than the Constitution had been able to do.
Lawrence lay in the cockpit, or hospital, when his men began to swarm down in confusion and leaderless panic. Still conscious, he was aware that disaster had overtaken them and he muttered again and again with his dying breath, "Don't give up the ship. Blow her up." Thus passed to an honorable fame an American naval officer of great gallantry and personal charm. Although he brought upon his country a bitter humiliation, the fact that he died sword in hand, his last thought for his flag and his service, has atoned for his faults of rashness and overconfidence. The odds were against him, and ill-luck smashed his chance of overcoming them. He was no more disgraced than Dacres when he surrendered the Guerrière to a heavier ship, or than Lambert, dying on his own deck, when he saw the colors of the Java hauled down.
The Shannon took her prize to Halifax, and when the news came back that the captain of the Chesapeake lay dead in a British port, the bronzed sea-dogs of the Salem Marine Society resolved to fetch his body home in a manner befitting his end. Captain George Crowninshield obtained permission from the Government to sail with a flag of truce for Halifax, and he equipped the brig Henry for the sad and solemn mission. Her crew was picked from among the shipmasters of Salem, some of them privateering skippers, every man of them a proven deep-water commander. It was such a crew as never before or since took a vessel out of an American port. When they returned to Salem with the remains of Captain Lawrence and Lieutenant Ludlow, the storied old seaport saw their funeral column pass through the quiet and crowded streets. The pall-bearers bore names to thrill American hearts today—Hull, Stewart, Bainbridge, Blakely, Creighton, and Parker, all captains of the navy. A Salem newspaper described the ceremonies simply and with an unconscious pathos:
The day was unclouded, as if no incident should be wanting to crown the mind with melancholy and woe—the wind from the same direction and the sea presented the same unruffled surface as was exhibited to our anxious view when on that memorable first day of July we saw the immortal Lawrence proudly conducting his ship to action. . . . The brig Henry containing the precious relics lay at anchor in the harbor. They were placed in barges and, preceded by a long procession of boats filled with seamen uniformed in blue jackets and trousers, with a blue ribbon on their hats bearing the motto of "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," were rowed by minute strokes to the end of India Wharf, where the bearers were ready to receive the honored dead. From the time the boats left the brig until the bodies were landed, the United States brig Rattlesnake and the brig Henry alternately fired minute guns . . . On arriving at the meeting-house the coffins were placed in the centre of the church by the seamen who rowed them ashore and who stood during the ceremony leaning upon them in an attitude of mourning. The church was decorated with cypress and evergreen, and the names of Lawrence and Ludlow appeared in gilded letters on the front of the pulpit.
It was wholly reasonable that the exploit of the Shannon should arouse fervid enthusiasm in the breast of every Briton. The wounds inflicted by Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge still rankled, but they were now forgotten and the loud British boastings equaled all the tales of Yankee brag. A member of Parliament declared that the "action which Broke fought with the Chesapeake was in every respect unexampled. It was not—and he knew it was a bold assertion which he made—to be surpassed by any other engagement which graced the naval annals of Great Britain." Admiral Warren was still in a peevish humor at the hard knocks inflicted on the Royal Navy when he wrote, in congratulating Captain Broke: "At this critical moment you could not have restored to the British naval service the preeminence it has always preserved, or contradicted in a more forcible manner the foul aspersions and calumnies of a conceited, boasting enemy than by the brilliant act you have performed. The relation of such an event restores the history of ancient times and will do more good to the service than it is possible to conceive."
Captain Broke was made a baronet and received other honors and awards which he handsomely deserved, but the wound he had suffered at the head of his boarding party disabled him for further sea duty. If the influence of the Constitution and the United States was far-reaching in improving the efficiency of the American navy, it can be said also that the victory of the Shannon taught the British service the value of rigorous attention to gunnery and a highly trained and disciplined personnel.
American chagrin was somewhat softened a few weeks later when two very small ships, the Enterprise and the Boxer, met in a spirited combat off the harbor of Portland, Maine, like two bantam cocks, and the Britisher was beaten in short order on September 5, 1813. The Enterprise had been a Yankee schooner in the war with Tripoli but had been subsequently altered to a square rig and had received more guns and men to worry the enemy's privateers. The brig-of-war was a kind of vessel heartily disliked by seamen and now vanished from blue water. The immortal Boatswain Chucks of Marryat proclaimed that "they would certainly damn their inventor to all eternity" and that "their common, low names, 'Pincher,' 'Thrasher,' 'Boxer,' 'Badger,' and all that sort, are quite good enough for them."
Commanding the Enterprise was Captain William Burrows, twenty-eight years old, who had seen only a month of active service in the war. Captain Samuel Blyth of the Boxer had worked his way up to this unimportant post after many years of arduous duty in the British navy. He might have declined a tussel with the Enterprise for his crew numbered only sixty-six men against a hundred and twenty, but he nailed his colors to the mainmast and remarked that they would never come down while there was any life in him.
The day was calm, the breeze fitful, and the little brigs drifted about each other until they lay within pistol shot. Then both loosed their broadsides, while the sailors shouted bravely, and both captains fell, Blyth killed instantly and Burrows mortally hurt but crying out that the flag must never be struck. There was no danger of this, for the Enterprise raked the British brig through and through until resistance was hopeless. Captain Blyth was as good as his word. He did not live to see his ensign torn down. Great hearts in little ships, these two captains were buried side by side in a churchyard which overlooks Casco Bay, and there you may read their epitaphs today.
The grim force of circumstances was beginning to alter the naval policy of the United States. Notwithstanding the dramatic successes, her flag was almost banished from the high seas by the close of the year 1813. The frigates Constellation, United States, and Macedonian were hemmed in port by the British blockade; the Adams and the Constitution were laid up for repairs; and the only formidable ships of war which roamed at large were the President, the Essex, and the Congress. The smaller vessels which had managed to slip seaward and which were of such immense value in destroying British commerce found that the system of convoying merchantmen in fleets of one hundred or two hundred sail had left the ocean almost bare of prizes. It was the habit of these convoys, however, to scatter as they neared their home ports, every skipper cracking on sail and the devil take the hindmost—a failing which has survived unto this day, and many a wrathful officer of an American cruiser or destroyer in the war against Germany could heartily echo the complaint of Nelson when he was a captain, "behaving as all convoys that ever I saw did, shamefully ill, and parting company every day."
This was the reason why American naval vessels and privateers left their own coasts and dared to rove in the English Channel, as Paul Jones had done in the Ranger a generation earlier. It was discovered that enemy merchantmen could be snapped up more easily within sight of their own shores than thousands of miles away. First to emphasize this fact in the War of 1812 was the naval brig Argus, Captain William H. Allen, which made a summer crossing and cruised for a month on end in the Irish Sea and in the chops of the Channel with a gorgeous recompense for her shameless audacity. England scolded herself red in the face while the saucy Argus captured twenty-seven ships and took her pick of their valuable cargoes. Her course could be traced by the blazing hulls that she left in her wake and this was how the British gun brig Pelican finally caught up with her.
Although the advantage of size and armament was with the Pelican, it was to be expected that the Argus would prove more than a match for her. The American commander, Captain Allen, had played a distinguished part in several of the most famous episodes of the navy. As third lieutenant of the Chesapeake, in 1807, he had picked up a live coal in the cook's galley, held it in his fingers, and so fired the only gun discharged against the Leopard in that inglorious surprise and surrender. As first officer of the frigate United States he received credit for the splendid gunnery which had overwhelmed the Macedonian, and he enjoyed the glory of bringing the prize to port. It was as a reward of merit that he was given command of the Argus. Alas, in this fight off the coast of Wales he lost both his ship and his life, and England had scored again. There was no ill-luck this time—nothing to plead in excuse. The American brig threw away a chance of victory because her shooting was amazingly bad, and instead of defending the deck with pistol, pike, and musket, when the boarders came over the bow the crew lowered the flag.
It was an early morning fight, on August 14, 1813, in which Captain Allen had his leg shot off within five minutes after the two brigs had engaged. He refused to be taken below, but loss of blood soon made him incapable of command, and presently his first lieutenant was stunned by a grapeshot which grazed his scalp. The ship was well sailed, however, and gained a position for raking the Pelican in deadly fashion, but the shot went wild and scarcely any harm was done. The British captain chose his own range and methodically made a wreck of the Argus in twenty minutes of smashing fire, working around her at will while not a gun returned his broadsides. Then he sheered close and was prepared to finish it on the deck of the Argus when she surrendered with twenty-three of her crew out of action. The Pelican was so little punished that only two men were killed. The officer left in command of the Argus laid this unhappy conclusion to "the superior size and metal of our opponent, and the fatigue which the crew underwent from a very rapid succession of prizes." There were those on board who blamed it to the casks of Oporto wine which had been taken out of the latest prize and which the sailors had secretly tapped. Honesty is the best policy, even in dealing with an enemy. The affair of the Argus and the Pelican was not calculated to inflate Yankee pride.
To balance this, however, came two brilliant actions by small ships. The new Peacock, named for the captured British brig, under Captain Lewis Warrington, stole past the blockade of New York. Off the Florida coast on the 29th of April she sighted a convoy and attacked the escort brig of eighteen guns, the Epervier. In this instance the behavior of the American vessel and her crew was supremely excellent and not a flaw could be found. They hulled the British brig forty-five times and made a shambles of her deck and did it with the loss of one man.
Even more sensational was the last cruise of the Wasp, Captain Johnston Blakely, which sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in May and roamed the English Channel to the dismay of all honest British merchantmen. The brig-of-war Reindeer endeavored to put an end to her career but nineteen minutes sufficed to finish an action in which the Wasp slaughtered half the British crew and thrice repelled boarders. This was no light task, for as Michael Scott, the British author of Tom Cringle's Log, candidly expressed it:
In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery deck of an enemy's vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against them . . . I don't like Americans. I never did and never shall like them. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth,—nor fight with them, were it not for the laurel to be acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one's steel as they have always proved.
Refitting in a French port, the dashing Blakely took the Wasp to sea again and encountered a convoy in charge of a huge, lumbering ship of the line. Nothing daunted, the Wasp flitted in among the timid merchant ships and snatched a valuable prize laden with guns and military stores. Attempting to bag another, she was chased away by the indignant seventy-four and winged it in search of other quarry until she sighted four strange sails. Three of them were British war brigs in hot pursuit of a Yankee privateer, and Johnston Blakely was delighted to play a hand in the game. He selected his opponent, which happened to be the Avon, and overtook her in the darkness of evening. Before a strong wind they foamed side by side, while the guns flashed crimson beneath the shadowy gleam of tall canvas. Thus they ran for an hour and a half, and then the Avon signaled that she was beaten, with five guns dismounted, forty-two men dead or wounded, seven feet of water in the hold, the magazine flooded, and the spars and rigging almost destroyed.
Blakely was about to send a crew aboard when another hostile brig, forsaking the agile Yankee privateer, came up to help the Avon. The Wasp was perfectly willing to take on this second adversary, but just then a third British ship loomed through the obscurity, and the ocean seemed a trifle overpopulated for safety. Blakely ran off before the wind, compelled to abandon his prize. The Avon, however, was so badly battered that she went to the bottom before the wounded seamen could be removed from her. Thence the Wasp went to Madeira and was later reported as spoken near the Cape Verde Islands, but after that she vanished from blue water, erased by some tragic fate whose mystery was never solved. To the port of missing ships she carried brave Blakely and his men after a meteoric career which had swept her from one victory to another.
Of the frigates, only three saw action during the last two years of the war, and of these the President and the Essex were compelled to strike to superior forces of the enemy. The Constitution was lucky enough to gain the open sea in December, 1814, and fought her farewell battle with the frigate Cyane and the sloop-of-war Levant on the 20th of February. In this fight Captain Charles Stewart showed himself a gallant successor to Hull and Bainbridge. Together the two British ships were stronger than the Constitution, but Stewart cleverly hammered the one and then the other and captured both. Honor was also due the plucky little Levant, which, instead of taking to her heels, stood by to assist her larger comrade like a terrier at the throat of a wolf. It is interesting to note that the captains, English and American, had received word that peace had been declared, but without official confirmation they preferred to ignore it. The spirit which lent to naval warfare the spirit of the duel was too strong to let the opportunity pass.
The President was a victim of a continually increased naval strength by means of which Great Britain was able to strangle the seafaring trade and commerce of the United States as the war drew toward its close. Captain Decatur, who had taken command of this frigate, remarked "the great apprehension and danger" which New York felt, in common with the entire seaboard, and the anxiety of the city government that the crew of the ship should remain for defense of the port. Coastwise navigation was almost wholly suspended, and thousands of sloops and schooners feared to undertake voyages to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston. Instead of these, canvas-covered wagons struggled over the poor highways in continuous streams between New England and the Southern coast towns. This awkward result of the blockade moved the sense of humor of the Yankee rhymsters who placarded the wagons with such mottoes as "Free Trade and Oxen's Rights" and parodied Ye Mariners of England with the lines: