by Ian W. Toll
In February 1807, Jefferson sent Congress a special message recommending the construction of a large fleet of gunboats. In addition to those previously authorized, he asked that two hundred additional vessels be constructed at an estimated cost of $1 million. He specified the number of vessels to be stationed in each section of the American coastline, from “the Mississippi and its neighboring waters” to “Boston and the harbors north of Cape Cod.” Thomas Paine, author of the American revolutionary pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, published a series of newspaper editorials supporting the proposal. The Republican majority in Congress, thankful for an excuse not to fund a larger naval mobilization, authorized the construction of 180 of the vessels.
As the first gunboats were launched and placed in service, criticism mounted. They were wet, cramped, and uncomfortable. It was often difficult to recruit full complements of seamen to man them. Officers took the first opportunity to be transferred into a frigate. When a Norfolk gunboat cap-sized and sank in six fathoms of water, Stephen Decatur dryly asked a fellow officer: “What would be the real national loss if all gunboats were sunk in a hundred fathoms of water?”
An anonymous letter published in the Washington Federalist, clipped and carefully filed among Jefferson’s personal papers, called the gunboat navy a “wasteful imbecility.” The author rejected the argument advanced by Paine and others that fifty gunboats were equivalent in force to a 74-gun battleship. While that might be true in a calm, he wrote, “In a breeze, the 74-gun ship…will have no more difficulty in running down a squadron of [gunboats] than a ship of three hundred tons would have in running down a fleet of birch canoes.” With cabin headroom of just four feet, the men below “will not only not be able to stand upright under cover, but cannot sit upright, unless they squat upon the floor like puppies in a dog kennel.” The author mocked the idea that a volunteer naval militia could provide adequate coastal defense:
When danger menaces any harbor, or any foreign ship behaves naughty, somebody is to inform the governor, and the governor is to desire the marshal to call upon the militia general or colonel in the neighborhood, to call upon the captains to call upon the drummers (these gentlemen who, we are informed from high military authority, are all important in the day of battle) to beat to arms, and call the militia men together…to go on board the gunboats and drive the naughty stranger away, unless he should take himself off during this long ceremonial.
Over time, the critics were proven right. The gunboats were effective only in exceptionally calm conditions. If hit by a heavy cannon ball fired by an enemy frigate or battleship, they were liable to sink. They were nearly impossible to man. Of the 278 gunboats authorized by the Congress between 1805 and 1807, only 176 were actually built, and fewer placed into service. The cost per vessel, originally estimated at $5,000, was actually closer to $10,000. Funds spent on the gunboat program eventually reached $1.5 million, a sum that could have paid for a small squadron of battleships or a large squadron of frigates. The program would be quietly abandoned after the inauguration of James Madison in 1809.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When coming on deck, a sailor stepped with his left foot first. When his ship was becalmed, he whistled. Pointing to the horizon, he used his whole hand, all fingers extended, because a single pointed finger could act as a lightning rod for evil spirits. The appearance of a petrel normally foretold a gale, unless the petrel was first seen during a gale, in which case the gale was on the verge of coming to an end. Cats held significant powers—black cats, especially. It was good luck to have a single black cat on board, but two on the same ship were considered bad luck (and one should be thrown into the sea). Every seabird was believed to carry the soul of a dead sailor, so it was considered very bad luck to kill one. To have one fly alongside the ship was generally lucky (except in the earlier case of a petrel before a gale). Above all, there was no creature luckier than an albatross, and no ship luckier than one with an albatross flying alongside.
Some seafaring superstitions had the potential to cause actual harm, such as the belief that it was dangerous to bathe because the water might wash away one’s good luck; or that blood spilled into the sea would cause a storm to abate; or that a man’s tattoos protected him against venereal diseases. Even the most gullible sailors conceded that some ancient myths were patently ridiculous, such as the theory that barnacles hatched baby geese, or the belief that seamen’s wives should burn their hair and fingernail cuttings lest they be stolen by witches and used to stir up storms. By the early nineteenth century, many officers, surgeons, and chaplains campaigned against superstitions, pointing out that the beliefs in question had been empirically disproven, or were detrimental to a sailor’s health, or sacrilegious. But seasoned officers also understood that long-held beliefs, whether true or not, retained a powerful hold over the minds of seamen. Their effects on morale could be controlled, but they should never be wholly ignored, because they sometimes threatened to turn self-fulfilling.
The frigate Chesapeake has often been described as “unfortunate,” “unlucky,” or “unhappy.” For the most part, these judgments were rendered after 1807, and especially after 1813. In later years, however, a feeling grew within naval circles that there had been something wrong with the Chesapeake from the beginning. Among the original six frigates, she was an oddity in several respects. Hers was the last of the six keels to be laid down on the stocks (in Norfolk). Originally designated as “Frigate D,” she was eventually named Chesapeake although there was already a sloop of war in commission with that name (the smaller vessel was rechristened Patapsco). Unlike each of her sisters, her name did not honor a feature or symbol of the U.S. Constitution. When launched in December 1799, Chesapeake was 152 feet in length—13 percent shorter than the three 44-gun frigates and 7 percent shorter than Constellation and Congress. In proportion to her length, she was heavier and beamier than her sisters, rendering her, by most accounts, a lethargic sailor. She was easily outrun by the President in a friendly contest near Guadaloupe in 1800, and Stephen Decatur, eight years later, remarked that “The Chesapeak as a Vessel of War Sails uncommonly dull.”
Chesapeake was built by Josiah Fox after his bitter falling out with fellow Quaker Joshua Humphreys. Fragmentary records do not make clear whether Fox shortened her keel because of his own design preferences, or because he did not have enough live oak timber on hand to build her to the larger specifications in Humphreys’s plan. The timber shortage was probably a factor, since much of the timber originally shipped to Norfolk had been redirected to Baltimore for the completion of the Constellation. But Fox, who had never liked Humphreys’s design, seems to have seized on the opportunity to throw aside the plans ordered by the Navy Office, and build Chesapeake according to his own ideas. As a result, she was the only one of the six original frigates explicitly disowned by Joshua Humphreys.
A reputation for bad luck could work to the detriment of a ship’s career as well as a man’s. Officers and seamen sensed that a ship was a living being, with a unique personality, and the facility to do evil as well as good. A nineteenth-century captain said his ship “can do anything but talk, and sometimes she can do even that.” Another engaged in one-sided conversations with his ship’s mizzenmast, asking how much sail she would like to carry. The question of Chesapeake’s unluckiness has been addressed more recently by Captain Edward Beach, a World War II and Cold War–era submarine commander who published several distinguished works of naval history before his death in 2002: “All ships have accidents from time to time, but in some ships every accident is considered the work of a malevolent star, some evil spirit of bad luck hovering over her. Such was the case with the Chesapeake…and it may have begun because, of the original six ships, she was the runt of the litter.”
EARLY IN 1807, Secretary Smith ordered the Chesapeake to sail for the Mediterranean to relieve the Constitution, which had been cruising without interruption since Preble had taken her out in 1803. Most of the Constitution’s enliste
d men had served for more than three and a half years, well beyond their two-year enlistment terms. Dispatches suggested that the Constitution’s officers had detected symptoms of mutiny on the lower decks. The Chesapeake was needed in the Mediterranean, the sooner the better, so that Constitution could return from her long tour and discharge her disgruntled crew.
Chesapeake’s captain would be James Barron, who would also carry the title of commodore of the much-diminished U.S. Mediterranean Squadron. Barron was to be provided with a flag captain, an officer who would bear day-to-day responsibility for looking after the ship and her crew. This was Master Commandant Charles Gordon, who received his orders on February 22.
At the time of Smith’s order, Chesapeake lay in ordinary at the Washington Navy Yard, where she was one of a long line of bare hulls in the shallows of the Potomac’s Eastern Branch. More than six months were needed to restore her to seaworthy condition. As the delays mounted, the officers accused the management and tradesmen of the Navy Yard of incompetence and even corruption. “I have long known the perverse disposition of the rulers of that establishment,” said Barron. Criticism began to appear in the press. “Foreign nations must form a high opinion of our energy and activity,” the Norfolk Gazette and Ledger of January 26, 1807, remarked with heavy sarcasm, “when they observe the whole attention of the Navy Department directed to one frigate, and she cannot be got to sea in something less than six months.”
After a last furious burst of activity in the first week of June, the Chesapeake cast loose her moorings and followed the channel buoys down the Eastern Branch and into the Potomac River. Tradition required the ship to fire a salute in honor of George Washington as she passed Mount Vernon on the river’s western bank. When the moment came, however, Captain Gordon “was struck with astonishment when the first lieutenant reported to me that neither the sponges nor cartridges would go in the guns.” This failure to fire the customary salute should have been construed as a sign that the Chesapeake was not yet ready for sea, but the lesson, apparently, was not taken to heart.
June was spawning season, and the Chesapeake shared the river with an armada of tiny shad, herring, and sturgeon boats. As she progressed down the Potomac, the banks gradually receded on either side, the stream widened to as much as seven miles, the current diminished and then died, and the water grew increasingly brackish. There was no exact point at which the river could be said to end and the Chesapeake Bay to begin. The average depth of the bay was about 20 feet, and the Chesapeake drew nearly that much, so she had to be piloted with care. Passing Windmill Point, she entered the shoal water off the Rappahannock River, where it was essential for the pilot to know the exact position of the notorious shoal known as the Wolf Trap, so named because it had put an end to the Wolf, a 300-ton merchantman, more than a century earlier. Most of the lower bay’s major shoals had been marked with buoys—a Virginia statute condemned any man caught stealing them to “suffer death without benefit of clergy.”
The Chesapeake came safely to anchor in Hampton Roads on June 4. The little town of Hampton, visible through the trees on the western shore, was the hometown of Commodore James Barron, and he would remain ashore until the ship was ready to sail. After a cursory inspection of the ship, he wrote Secretary Smith to say that “from the extreme cleanliness and order in which I found her, I am convinced that Captain Gordon and his officers must have used great exertions. Captain Gordon speaks in high terms of his lieutenants. The state of the ship proves the justice of his encomiums.” Whether the praise was sincere or just a routine professional courtesy to Gordon would be a subject of later controversy. Barron would regret having written the letter.
For two weeks, the crew worked fitfully to ready the ship for sea. The remaining 18-pounder long guns and 32-pounder carronades were brought on board, fitted into their carriages, and loaded with powder and shot. The men were divided into watches. On June 19, Captain Gordon reported that the ship was ready to sail: “we are unmoored and ready for sea on the first fair wind.”
A FEW MILES EAST AS THE CROW FLIES, anchored in Lynnhaven Bay, were several frigates and battleships of the Royal Navy. They had been stationed there throughout the winter, ostensibly to watch a few French warships that had taken refuge in the upper Chesapeake the previous August. In spite of rising Anglo-American tensions, the British squadron had maintained cordial relations with the towns and communities of Tidewater Virginia. They had not obstructed commercial traffic in the manner of the Cambrian and Leander off New York a year earlier, and British naval officers were frequently seen walking the streets of Norfolk or Hampton, where they purchased most of the squadron’s provisions.
But the British officers were incensed at having recently lost a large number of deserters. Sailors were prone to desert British warships wherever they sailed, and this was especially true in American coastal waters, where if a deserter managed to get ashore he was free to begin a new life among people who spoke his own language. Local sheriffs and magistrates were never inclined to cooperate in returning these asylum seekers, and this tendency had been elevated to a high principle in Virginia, where state law imposed penalties on any local official who laid a hand on a British deserter. There was a perpetual shortage of prime seamen in Norfolk, and merchants and shipowners relied on foreign (generally British) sailors to man their outbound vessels. Even when there were enough hands to go around, it was always in the merchant’s interest that there should be more, because nothing depressed wages so efficiently as large numbers of unemployed seamen.
In the spring of 1807, every vessel in the British squadron at Lynnhaven Bay had lost a portion of her crew to desertion, including the 74-gun ships of the line Triumph, Bellisle, and Bellona, the storeship Chichester, and the frigate Melamphus. Only the most trusted seamen in the British squadron were ever permitted to set foot on shore, but as the weather grew warmer, some men had managed to swim to freedom and others had commandeered boats. On the night of March 7, 1807, five members of the crew of the English 16-gun sloop Halifax had overpowered a midshipman, ran a jolly boat on shore at Sewell’s Point in Hampton Roads, and melted into the local community.
With every reason to fear the lash or the noose if apprehended, a British deserter’s safest form of maritime employment was to enlist in a foreign navy. By custom, law, and standing orders, the Royal Navy had no authority to stop and search the naval vessels of a nation at peace with England. To do so could be interpreted as an act of war.* So it was not surprising that a number of deserters from the British squadron—including several men who had fled the Melamphus and all five of the men who had made their escape in the Halifax’s jolly boat—went to a U.S. Navy recruiting station in Norfolk and entered onto the Chesapeake’s books under false names.
When the British officers got wind of this, they lodged protests with their American counterparts. Stephen Decatur, who now commanded the Gosport Naval Yard, replied he had nothing to do with the manning of the Chesapeake and referred the matter to Commodore Barron. Barron suggested that the British take the question up with the civil authorities. The commander of the Halifax lodged a complaint with the British consul in Norfolk, the consul referred the matter to the British ambassador in Washington, and the ambassador lodged a formal protest with Secretary of State Madison, who declined to intervene in the case because the issue of British deserters had never been addressed in any Anglo-American treaty. (Madison’s transparent objective was to force the British government to negotiate a treaty addressing both desertion and impressment.)
With no recourse though legal or diplomatic channels, the British officers stewed. It was bad enough that known deserters from the squadron could go straight to a Norfolk rendezvous and enlist aboard a Yankee frigate. It was even worse that they could parade through the streets of Norfolk, boasting of their escape to all who would listen. In March, on a street near the Norfolk wharves, Captain James Townsend of the Halifax came face-to-face with two of the men who had stolen his jolly boat. Realizing he had no
power to coerce them while on American soil, Townsend attempted to coax them into returning to the Halifax voluntarily. One, a British-born seaman named Jenkin Ratford, hurled epithets at his ex-commander and declared (according to Townsend) that “he would be damned if he should return to the ship; that he was in the Land of Liberty; and that he would do as he liked, and that I had no business with him.”
The infuriating exchange was reported to Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkeley, commander in chief of the British North American station, headquartered in Halifax. Known deserters from the Halifax, wrote Captain Townsend, “were seen by me & several of the Officers…patrolling the Streets of Norfolk in triumph.” He estimated that no fewer than thirty-five British seamen had enlisted aboard the Chesapeake. Admiral Berkeley forwarded the reports to London and asked for instructions. On June 1, 1807, having not yet received a reply, he wrote out a circular order to be distributed to the commanders throughout his station:
Whereas many Seamen, subjects of His Britannic Majesty, and serving in His Ships and Vessels…while at Anchor in the Chesapeak, deserted and entered On Board the United States frigate called the Chesapeak, and openly paraded the Streets at Norfolk, in sight of their Officers under the American flag, protected by the Magistrates of the Town and the Recruiting Officer belonging to the above mentioned American Frigate….
The Captains & Commander of his Majesty’s Ships and Vessels under my Command are therefore hereby required and directed in case of meeting with the American frigate the Chesapeak at sea…to show to the Captain of her this Order; and to require to search his Ship for the deserters from the before mentioned Ships, and to proceed and search for the same; and if a similar demand should be made by the American, he is to be permitted to search for any Deserters from their Service, according to the Customs and usage of civilized nations on terms of peace and Amity with each other.
