Having noted, in the stories of the actions hitherto described, somewhat of the training, skill, and good-will of the American seamen in the use of naval weapons, and their masterful knowledge of seamanship, the time arrives for telling how one of these Yankee frigates won the first signal victory of the war—the victory of the Constitution over the Guerrière. But it will add to the pleasure of every American reader if the opinions which the British captain expressed about his ship, both before and after the battle, be told before the battle is described.

At the time the Guerrière went into the fight she was commanded by Captain James Richard Dacres. In the course of the cruise during which the squadron under Broke chased the Constitution, Captain Dacres dined on board the Shannon. While pacing the deck of the Shannon, after dinner, and talking with Broke, Captain Dacres said emphatically of his ship:

“I say, she looks beautiful; and more, she’d take an antagonist in half the time the Shannon could.”

On making full allowance for a captain’s disposition to boast unduly of the qualities of his ship, it is still fair to say that Dacres considered her at any rate equal to the Shannon, although the Shannon carried more guns.

To strengthen this conclusion it may be added that Captain Dacres sent a challenge to Captain Rodgers of the President, which was a sister ship to the Constitution. Further than that we have the words of Captain Dacres when he was court-martialled for losing her: “I am so well aware that the success of my opponent was owing to fortune, that it is my earnest wish, and would be the happiest moment of my life, to be once more opposed to the Constitution in a frigate of similar force to the Guerrière.”

These assertions must appear to every reader to be a confession of faith in his ship. Nor was Captain Dacres alone in his belief that she was a good one.

“The Guerrière is as fine a frigate as we can boast of,” said the St. Christopher’s Gazette in the same year, while lamenting her loss.

What the English newspapers thought of the Constitution before this battle with the Guerrière is also worth repeating. The opinions they expressed were, of course, a repetition of those expressed by British naval officers, who had visited her at various times, but notably after she had called at Portsmouth as related in a preceding chapter. They spoke of her as “a bunch of pine boards,” and as “a fir-built ship with a bit of striped bunting at her mast-head,” and “their opinions gave rise to various excellent jokes that were uttered in and out of the British Parliament at the commencement of the war.”

To these statements must be added the further fact that the boastful captain of the Guerrière had taken the trouble to notify the Americans that his ship “was not the Little Belt,” referring to the affair in which the Little Belt was so severely pounded by a Yankee frigate.

The Constitution sailed from Boston on August 2, 1812. Captain Hull had reported his escape from the British squadron in a modest letter to the Navy Department, but he did not wait for further orders from the Secretary. He conjectured that his narrow escape would so frighten the timid officials, who had previously warned him in his official instructions not to voluntarily engage any superior force, that they would keep him lying inactive in port. In this conjecture he was entirely right, for a few days after he had sailed, orders to that effect did arrive. A good naval authority says that “had the Constitution been captured on the cruise, Hull would have been hanged or shot for sailing without orders.” It has often been a matter of consolation to American naval officers in these last years of the nineteenth century to read of the incapacity and cowardice of department officials in the early years of it.

Having taken the risk, Captain Hull coasted along to the north as far as the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On August 15th five vessels were seen in a bunch, and on approaching them, four scattered away, leaving the fifth, a brig, on fire. One was chased and found to be an English merchantman in the hands of an American prize crew. Before night the American brig Adeline was overhauled and taken from the British prize crew found on board of her. On the night of the 18th a third vessel was overhauled after a smart race, and this was an unfortunate affair, for she proved to be the American privateer Decatur, of fourteen guns, twelve of which had been thrown overboard in her mad race with the Constitution.

From the captain of the Decatur Captain Hull learned that a British frigate had been seen the day before steering to the southward under easy sail. On hearing that, Captain Hull crowded the canvas on the Constitution in chase of her.

There were light westerly breezes during the night and early morning following, but as the day wore on the breeze canted to the northwest and freshened until the Constitution, with all plain sail set, was bowling along at little less than the speed she attained in her spurt away from the fleet off Barnegat. Until after dinner nothing was seen, but before the 2-o’clock bell was struck the lookout astride the fore-royal-yard stirred the crew with the prolonged cry of

“Sail-ho!”

It is said that half the men about deck climbed into the rigging in their eagerness to see the stranger, and within a few minutes their curiosity was gratified, when it appeared plainly that she was a large ship steering to the southwest. So, with sheets eased, the Constitution headed away for her, and by half-past 3 o’clock the Yankee crew had not only learned that she was a British frigate, but that her captain was ready to fight, for he set his flag and made no effort to get away.

The first measure of strength between a British and an American frigate—the battle between the Guerrière and the Constitution—was at hand.

Over on the Guerrière, Captain Dacres, when he first saw the Constitution boldly bearing down upon him, was doubtful about her character, and he was good enough to consult in the matter with an American prisoner whom he had on board—Captain Orne, of the American brig Betsey, captured some time before. The American skipper said it was a Yankee frigate that was coming. To this Captain Dacres replied that he thought she came down too boldly for an American, but added: “The better he behaves the more honor we shall gain by taking him.” A little later, when the colors had been displayed, he called out to the crew:

“There is a Yankee frigate; in forty-five minutes she is certainly ours. Take her in fifteen and I promise you four months’ pay.”

This must have been said at about twenty minutes past 4 o’clock, for it was at that time that the English officers hoisted flags to every mast-head and opened fire, “more with a view to try the distance than for any effectual attack.”

At that Captain Hull began to shorten sail on the Constitution. The breeze was steady and fresh, and the water fairly smooth. It was just the kind of weather he would have chosen for such a battle. All the light sails, including the top-gallant sails, were furled, the courses were hauled up to the yards, and the royal-yards were sent down. Then the top-sails were double-reefed, and as the men came down from the top-sail-yards the drums beat to quarters. Not many of the crew had ever been in battle, but “from the smallest boy in the ship to the oldest seaman not a look of fear was seen.”

The enemy’s first shots fell short, but the second round passed over the deck of the Constitution, though without doing any damage. A deal of what a yachtsman would call jockeying for position followed. The enemy squared away before the wind, and wore around until her port (left side) battery would bear, and then, as the Constitution was coming down the wind and following close after her, she wore back till her starboard (right side) battery would bear. As she turned from side to side she fired on the Constitution. The Constitution replied with an occasional shot from a bow-gun. The enemy was twisting about to avoid being raked by the Constitution, and was firing to cripple the enemy’s rigging. But all that the twisting amounted to was to keep the Guerrière at “long balls”—out of range of the shorter guns of the Constitution. To end that kind of work Captain Hull spread his maintopgallant sail and foresail. Impelled by these, the Constitution began to forge within close range, and the projectiles from the Guerrière began to come on board. One big shot through the forward bulwarks knocked no end of splinters across the deck, and some of them pierced several of a gun’s crew hard by. The men were eager to return the fire, but Captain Hull paced the quarter-deck, saying nothing. A rousing cheer from the British crew came over the water as they saw that they had hulled the Constitution. Lieutenant Morris walked aft, and said to Captain Hull:

“The enemy has opened fire and killed two of our men. Shall we return it?”

“Not yet, sir,” replied Captain Hull. The captain was waiting for a shorter range. Twice more Lieutenant Morris, to ease the minds of the impatient gunners, walked aft to ask permission to fire, and each time received the same answer. The Guerrière had meantime steered away before the wind; the clipper stem of the Yankee was overreaching the Englishman’s quarter only a few yards away from it; our guns were brought to bear, and then stooping till “he split his knee-breeches from waistband to buckle,” Captain Hull straightened up again to his full height and shouted in a voice heard all over the ship:

“Now, boys; pour it into them!”

With a yell they obeyed. The broadside was as a single explosion. The crash of the iron balls through the splintering timbers of the Guerrière came back as an echo, and as she rolled with the swell the blood of the dead and wounded gushed from her scuppers. The Yankee gunners had aimed as if feeling still the claws of the British cat in their backs.

It was at 6.05 A.M. that this first broadside was fired from the American ship. For fifteen minutes the roar of the cannon and the rattle of musketry, and the crash of solid shot that struck home were incessant. The ships were literally yard-arm to yard-arm, rising and sinking over the long swells as they drove away before the wind. The British in mad haste pulled their lanyards and fired the moment their guns were primed. The Americans loaded in haste, but paused each time until their gun-sights ranged on hull or spar, and then they fired.

At 6.20 A.M. a big round shot from the Constitution crashed through the mizzen-mast of the Guerrière, and away it went, over the rail to starboard. Snatching off his hat, Captain Hull waved it above his head.

“Hurrah, my boys! we’ve made a brig of her!” he shouted.

They had done more. The mast was still held by its rigging, and, dragging in the water, it brought the Guerrière around partly across the wind. The Constitution forged ahead, swung her yards, ported her helm, and ranging across the enemy’s bows gave her a raking broadside. The Guerrière’s main-yard came tumbling down, shot through at the mast. Then, swinging around before the wind, the Yankee brought her port battery to bear and gave the Guerrière a second raking. So close together were the two ships now that the Guerrière’s bowsprit came poking over the quarter-deck of the Constitution. A man on the Constitution reached out of a cabin port and placed his hand on the enemy’s figure-head. The Guerrière’s bowsprit fouled the Constitutions port mizzen rigging and the bow-chasers of the Guerrière began to play havoc with the cabin of the Constitution, which was soon on fire from blazing wads.

As the men on the Constitution ran to extinguish this fire Captain Dacres on the Guerrière called away boarders, intending to climb along his bowsprit to reach the Constitution’s quarter-deck, but when he saw the men on the Constitution ready to receive him he thought differently about it. The Yankees then thought to board, and brave Lieutenant Bush, of the marines, jumped on the rail for the honor of leading the way, and there was shot dead by a British marine. For a few moments the two ships hung together, sawing up and down, while the bulk of each crew was massed for boarding and the topmen on each ship poured a galling fire into the other. Lieutenant Morris was shot through the body and Master Alwyn was but little less severely wounded. Captain Hull climbed part way upon the rail, but a big Yankee seaman dragged him back unceremoniously, and begged him not to do that unless he first took “off them swabs”—pointing to the captain’s gold epaulets. A sailor who fired a pistol at one of the enemy and missed him, threw the pistol with better, though not fatal, aim. He hit the fellow in the breast. And then the flag at the Constitution’s mizzen-truck was shot down. The enemy cheered, but John Hogan shinned up and replaced it, although a number of British marines fired at him steadily all the time he was exposed.

At last the larger spread of canvas on the Constitution pulled her clear, and then, as she began to swing around into position to open fire again, both the main and the foremast of the Guerrière that had been badly cut by the American shot went over the rail with a crash, and there she lay a helpless hulk.

It was then exactly 6.23 o’clock, or about two hours since the firing of the first gun from the Guerrière. But from the time that the Constitution fired her first broadside, it was less than thirty minutes.

Veering off for a brief interval, the Constitution’s crew made hasty repairs to the rigging, and then came back with guns loaded. They found the Guerrière in the trough of the sea rolling her main-deck guns under water with every passing swell.

The Constitution had been at her less than thirty minutes, but all three of her masts had been shot away, and were dragging over the rail by such of the shrouds as had not been cut by the shot of the Yankees. Her hull was knocked into a sieve by the Yankee round-shot. Thirty of these projectiles had penetrated her more than four feet below the water-line. The cool Yankee gunner had watched her rolling her side out of water and then aimed his gun at the copper below the water-line. Out of a crew of two hundred and seventy-two, twenty-three men were dead or mortally hurt, and fifty-six were more or less severely wounded—more than one-fourth of her crew had been hit in that brief time. On the Constitution seven men had been killed and seven wounded, while her hull had scarcely been touched below the bulwarks.

The Constitution was ready for an all-night battle. The Guerrière was ready only for the torch. She was “a perfect wreck.” She could not be carried into port and had to be burned.

There was no flag flying on the Guerrière when the Constitution returned to her, and so Third Lieutenant George Campbell Read was sent off in a boat to hail her. Pulling under her lee quarter he found Captain Dacres leaning over the rail, and asked him if he had surrendered. According to the careful Maclay the following conversation took place—when Captain Dacres replied:

“I don’t know that it would be prudent to continue the engagement any longer.”

“Do I understand you to say that you have struck?” asked Lieutenant Read.

“Not precisely,” returned Dacres, “but I don’t know that it will be worth while to fight any longer.”

“If you cannot decide, I will return aboard my ship and we will resume the engagement,” said the American officer.

To this Captain Dacres called out somewhat excitedly: “Why, I am pretty much hors de combat already. I have hardly men enough left to work a single gun, and my ship is in a sinking condition.”

“I wish to know, sir,” peremptorily demanded Lieutenant Read, “whether I am to consider you a prisoner of war or an enemy. I have no time for further parley.”

Captain Dacres replied with evident reluctance: “I believe now there is no alternative. If I could fight longer I would, with pleasure; but—I—must—surrender.”

Read continued:

“Commodore Hull’s compliments, and wishes to know whether you need the assistance of a surgeon or surgeon’s mate?”

“Well, I should suppose you had on board your own ship business enough for all your medical officers,” replied Dacres.

“Oh, no,” said Read, blithely, “we had only seven wounded, and they were dressed half an hour ago.”

The end of it was that Captain Dacres was carried on board the Constitution. He had been wounded, but was able to climb the rope-ladder to her deck, and there he found Captain Hull awaiting him. It was a notable meeting in more ways than one—physically among the rest. For Hull was short, rotund, and jolly—very much like our portraits of John Bull—while Dacres was tall, lank, and serious—not much different from a typical New Englander. Hull helped the beaten captain to the deck, saying heartily: “Dacres, give me your hand, I know you are hurt.” A moment later Captain Dacres made a formal offer of his sword, but Hull refused it.

“No, no,” he said, “I will not take a sword from one who knows so well how to use it; but I’ll trouble you for that hat.”

This apparently incongruous remark was due to the fact that when Dacres had met Hull socially before the war he had offered to bet a hat that the Guerrière would whip the Constitution if they ever met, and Hull accepted the bet.

It was on the afternoon of August 21, 1812, that the wreck of the Guerrière was fired and blown to the four winds of heaven by the triumphant Yankees, and from that day to this the naval writers of both England and America have been trying to tell how it was that the Guerrière was so badly beaten in so short a time. A half-dozen different explanations may be found in the books of any great nation, and all are very much alike, even though written by partisans. They give the details of the battle, how the ships approached each other; how they veered and wore; how the crews cheered; how they fired the guns; how the splinters flew; how the blood flowed from the scuppers—of one ship; how with great reluctance the one surrendered. Then with one accord the writers set to work to examine the hulk of the Guerrière. Was it sound or rotten? They counted the guns. How many did each ship have in a broadside? They measured the calibres of the guns. They weighed the projectiles. “Why, blow me, sir! The Constitution had long twenty-fours to our eighteens!” “All right, but by gosh, our shot were seven per cent. under weight!” They considered the gunpowder chemically to see whether or not it had deteriorated on the Guerrière. They counted the crews. They considered every little detail.

As we look back at a distance of eighty-five years upon the battle it must seem to a candid student of naval matters that the excuses and the explanations were hardly worthy of the great peoples engaged in making them. Nevertheless, because it is the conventional thing, these details shall be given here:

The Constitution measured (Roosevelt’s account) 1,576 tons; the Guerrière, 1,338. The Constitution could fire 27 guns in a broadside, throwing 684 pounds of metal (actual weight); the Guerrière, 25 guns, throwing 556 pounds of metal. The Constitution carried 456 men; the Guerrière but 272. The Constitution lost, as already told, 7 killed and 7 wounded; while the Guerrière lost 23 killed and 56 wounded—over one-fourth of her crew. The comparative force of the ships rated by these standards, was as 100 to 70; the comparative casualties were as 18 to 100. To this may be added that the relative injury to the ships was as 100 to nothing.

Arguing from these figures the British writers say that the Constitution was “a seventy-four-gun ship of the line in disguise.” “Why should not any American feel proud of that assertion?” For if it be so, the old Quaker ship-builder of Philadelphia was not only the greatest ship-builder in America, but in the whole world. When the British officers called her so they confessed that when they had called her “a bunch of pine boards” they were mistaken. They confessed that they had been utterly incapable of judging the fighting worth of the Constitution, although they had gone over her and examined her carefully.

The British point to the fact that our most powerful projectiles came from twenty-four pounders, while theirs were from eighteens. Here again they confess their own inability to arm a ship. They had for twenty years been fighting the navies of Europe. Out of the experience there gained they had decided that the long eighteens were the best calibre for the main-deck battery of a frigate. The last frigates launched from British ship-yards previous to this battle were armed with long eighteens. The British officers who inspected the Constitution from time to time before the war of 1812 ridiculed the idea of trying to fight with long twenty-fours. The long twenty-fours were “too heavy!” But when their best frigates had been defeated by the Yankees they began to weigh the projectiles and learned that their defeat was due to the much ridiculed twenty-fours.

If the British had carried their investigations into the size of the shot a trifle further—to the mechanism of the guns, for instance—they would have learned something of real significance. They would have seen that the cannon of the Constitution were furnished with sights. The Guerrière lost her masts not by accident, but because the cool Yankee gunners could aim their weapons accurately.

But the most important—rather the most pleasing of all the confessions in the British explanations after defeat is that relating to the superior numbers of the American crews. The count showed 456 individuals on the Constitution, and 272 on the Guerrière. To contend, as the British writers do contend, that the “superiority on the American side “was” in number of men as—nine to five,” is to admit that man for man, an American naval seaman, in spite of his lack of experience, was the equal of the tar-stained, cicatrice-marked British seaman; and that was a confession which Americans in those days (not now) were most anxious to extort.

But the British writers did not stop at this confession. They went further and admitted all the most boastful Yankee could have wished. They said (vide the British Naval Chronicle), that “the few on board an American ship-of-war that are designated as boys are as old and stout as most men employed in our service.”

And the last of all is the confession of the same periodical that “had the Guerrière’s men been half as well skilled in the use of great guns as the Constitution’s were, the proportion of killed and wounded would not have been so great nor one ship made a complete wreck of while the other suffered no material injury in hull or rigging.”

So sang the old-time Yankee rhymester of the ship that “was not the Little Belt.”

The British Admiralty boards eventually threw aside their prejudices, and adopted long twenty-fours with sights on them in place of unsighted long eighteens. They have done even more than that, for when in these last years the swift armored cruiser New York, with her eight-inch rifles in turrets, was added to the American navy, giving us the most powerful cruiser in the world, they at once laid down four armored cruisers that were larger in displacement and carried more powerful engines, thicker turrets, and a more powerful armament than the New York.

During the night after the battle the boats were kept busy transferring the prisoners from the wreck to the Constitution. Ten kidnapped Americans were found among her crew, but the humane Dacres had not compelled them to fight against their own flag. A sail was seen steering south at twenty minutes past two o’clock, and the Constitution cleared for action, but the vessel passed on, and soon disappeared. At daylight the lieutenant in charge of the wreck hailed to say she had four feet of water in her hold and appeared to be in danger of sinking, but she kept afloat until afternoon, when she was set on fire, and at 3.15 P.M., on August 21, 1812, the flames reached her magazine and she was blown to pieces. “A huge column of smoke arose and stood for a long time in the calm atmosphere, and then slowly crumbled to pieces, revealing only a few shattered planks to tell where the proud vessel had sunk. The sea never rolled over a vessel whose fate so startled the world.”

It is worth noting, perhaps, that the father of Captain Dacres of the Guerrière was the Captain James Richard Dacres who commanded the schooner Carleton on Lake Champlain at the time of the fight with Arnold’s haymakers, and that both father and son became admirals in the service.

As it happened, the Constitution reached Boston most opportunely. Detroit had been surrendered to the British without a single shot having been fired in its defence. Fort Dearborn, too, that stood where Chicago now stands, had been taken by the Indian allies of the British and the garrison massacred. Instead of triumphantly wresting Canada from the British Crown, as the foolish politicians in Congress had proposed to do, the American militia had been beaten back and the Canadians seemed in a fair way to annex all the United States domain lying west of the longitude of Lake Erie. The people had hoped for nothing from the navy. The Administration had even sent orders to Captain Hull to remain in port, but Hull had sailed before the orders arrived, and now returned with the crew of the Guerrière—the British frigate that had sailed up and down the coast, kidnapping American citizens and flaunting her identity in the face of all America by painting her name across her foretopsail.

The Constitution appeared off Boston Light on August 30th, dressed in fluttering bunting. Look-outs along shore saw and understood these signals, and horsemen, wild with enthusiasm, galloped into the city. Cannon roared from every fort as she sailed up the harbor, and flags were flung to the breeze from every mast-head. The people in thousands gathered at the long wharf to welcome her. A banquet was given to the officers in Faneuil Hall, where the venerable John Adams, the first advocate of a national navy in the old Colonial Congress, presided. Congress voted a gold medal to Captain Hull and silver medals to the commissioned officers, and $50,000 to the whole crew. A piece of plate was given to Lieutenant Morris by his townsmen. The citizens of Portland, Maine (Falmouth), gave a sword to their townsman, Lieutenant Alexander Scammel Wadsworth. Virginia gave swords to Midshipmen Morgan and Taylor. The people had looked upon the navy with doubt; they had seen with anxious fear the Constitution sail away. But now the whole nation went wild, and the song of the exultant poet rang wherever the people gathered: