Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  On June 19, as the newly refitted frigate worked her way down the Potomac, the declaration of war was read out to the crew, who answered with three cheers. The Constitution sailed up the bay to Annapolis, where she remained at anchor just off the town for two weeks, taking on additional men and equipment and a new battery of 32-pounder carronades. From the moment the new hands came aboard the ship, they drilled constantly at the great guns and small arms. Cannon crews practiced their marksmanship every day by firing live charges at hogsheads anchored several hundred yards away from the ship. The targets were smashed to splinters, and the reverberations of the guns were heard for miles across Chesapeake Bay. “[T]he Crew you will readily conceive, must yet be unacquainted with a Ship of War, as many of them have but lately joined us and never were in an armed Ship before,” Hull told Hamilton. “We are doing all that we can to make them acquainted with the duty, and in a few days we shall have nothing to fear from any single deck Ship.”

  Hull’s orders required him to “use the utmost dispatch to reach New York,” where the Constitution would be attached to Commodore Rodgers’s squadron. Secretary Hamilton wrote Hull again on July 3, adding that in the event Constitution should fall in with a British cruiser during the passage to New York, “you will be guided in your proceeding by your own judgment, bearing in mind, however, that you are not, voluntarily, to encounter a force superior to your own.”

  Constitution sailed from Annapolis with the morning tide on July 5. She took a week to work her way down the Chesapeake Bay, during which time the crew continued to drill continuously. On the twelfth, she cleared the Virginia Capes and put to sea.

  Light headwinds and a current setting to the southward made for slow sailing. For three days, Constitution crept along the coasts of Maryland and Delaware. There was not a single sail visible on the horizon until the afternoon of the fifteenth, when the frigate fell in with a merchant brig inbound to Baltimore and gave her the news that war was declared. The same day, Hull ordered the newly mounted carronades fired five times with double charges and double shot; the experiment proved the guns “to stand very well.”

  On July 17, when the frigate was just off Barnegat and Egg Harbor on the New Jersey coast (near the modern-day location of Atlantic City), the lookout caught sight of four topsails in the north. Their hulls were still down over the horizon, but judging by the size of their sails they were “apparently Ships of War.” An hour later, the lookout sighted a fifth sail further out to sea. Five was the exact number of vessels in Rodgers’s squadron, and since Hull had expected to find Rodgers in the waters off nearby Sandy Hook, he naturally assumed that the strangers were friendly. At 4:00 p.m., Hull ordered the Constitution to tack and stand to the east, toward the nearest sail. He hoped to get within night-signaling range in order to confirm that the strangers were Americans.

  At sunset, the wind veered around into the south, which brought the Constitution to windward of the other vessels. Shortly thereafter, as a precaution, the drummer tapped out the call to quarters and the crew went to their battle stations. As darkness fell, Constitution drew steadily closer to the nearest of the strangers, which could now be discerned as a frigate. At 10:00 p.m., Hull judged that he was within night-signaling range—about six to eight miles—and the lanterns were hoisted. None of the strangers, not even the nearest frigate, set a signal in response. Hull went forward into the forecastle to have a better look. It was an unusual place for a captain, and according to Able Seaman Moses Smith, the foremast jacks “clustered around him respectfully.” Hull was beginning to sense that all was not right. At eleven o’clock, when the signals had remained unanswered for an hour, he gave the order to haul the sheets and make all sail to windward.

  That night, the officers and enlisted men remained at their battle stations. Smith, who later published a memoir entitled Naval Scenes in the Last War (1846), recalled that “every man on board the Constitution was wide awake. There was no sneaking from duty in any part of the brave old ship.” He was assigned to act as sponger for gun No. 1, positioned forward on the larboard side of the gun deck, and tried to catch a few hours of sleep by curling up on deck, his ramrod and sheepskin sponger clutched in his hands.

  At the first light of dawn, the officers and crew of the Constitution took in an appalling sight. Two frigates were positioned just under the Constitution’s lee, almost within cannon-shot range. A third was directly astern, about five or six miles away. A few miles further astern, hull-down from the deck but hull-up from the masthead, lay a fourth frigate, a battleship, a brig, and a schooner. All were flying British colors.

  The frigates were the Shannon, Belvidera, Aeolus, and Guerrière; the battleship was the 64-gun Africa; and the squadron commodore was Captain Philip B. V. Broke of the Shannon. Having sailed from Halifax the same day the Constitution had sailed from Annapolis, Broke’s squadron had swept down the American coast, taking every vessel unlucky enough to be caught in its path. On July 16, it had pounced on the 14-gun brig Nautilus, a vessel that had seen extensive duty as part of Edward Preble’s Third Mediterranean Squadron in 1803–04.

  It was Hull’s duty to run from such an overwhelming force, and he ordered the hands to make all sail. But as the sun rose, the breeze abruptly vanished, and it fell a dead calm. The Constitution wallowed helplessly on the swell, her sails hanging limp from the yards, and would not answer her helm at all. The ship, wrote First Lieutenant Charles Morris, was “entirely becalmed and unmanageable.” With no steerageway, the Constitution’s bow began to fall off toward the two frigates to larboard. In so doing, she was in danger of rotating into a position in which she would be vulnerable to a raking broadside.

  Shortly after sunrise, one of the British frigates, the Shannon, tried a few long-ranging cannon shots. One of the high-arching balls actually passed over the Constitution and splashed down into the sea to windward—but the range, said Lieutenant Morris, was “too great for accuracy, and their shot did not strike our ship.”

  There was only one hope of saving the Constitution, and that was to lower the boats and take the ship under tow. The first and second cutters were hoisted out. Hawsers were secured to the bowsprit, and a long scope was paid out to the boats, in order to make the angle of the towline nearly horizontal. Pulling hard and in unison, the oarsmen gradually brought the Constitution’s head around to the southward. This kept her larboard broadside facing the enemy, who remained just beyond cannon-shot range. With the oarsmen still pulling, the great ship began moving through the sea, at a speed of perhaps half a knot, toward Delaware Bay.

  The towing brought the pursuers astern of the Constitution, where her main battery would not bear. The frigate had not mounted stern chasers, and Hull now ordered a 24-pounder long gun—a weapon weighing more than 2 tons—hoisted up from the gun deck. An 18-pounder was run aft along the gangway from the forecastle. The carpenters were summoned to cut away the Constitution’s taffrail, to allow the guns to fire over the stern. Below, another set of men invaded the sanctity of the captain’s cabin in order to run two more 24-pounders through the stern windows.

  At seven in the morning, Hull tried a ranging shot from one of the newly mounted guns, with the barrel at maximum elevation. The captain took the match in his own hand to fire the first shot. “I stood within a few feet of Hull at the time,” Moses Smith remembered. “He clapped the fire to my gun, No. 1, and such a barking sound as sounded over the sea! It was worth hearing. No sooner had our iron dog opened his mouth in this manner, than the whole enemy opened the whole of theirs. Every one of the ships fired directly toward us. Those nearest kept up their firing for some time; but of course not a shot reached us then, at the distance we were.”

  Not long after the Constitution’s boats began towing ahead, the British imitated the maneuver. Captain Byron of the Belvidera ordered his ship’s boats hoisted out. Soon afterward, Commodore Broke made a signal ordering his consorts to send all of their boats to tow the Shannon. With several boats towing her in unison, wrote Hul
l, the Shannon “came up very fast.”

  At that moment, about eight o’clock in the morning, the officers and crew of the Constitution shared a strong conviction that the ship was doomed. If Shannon was brought into cannon-shot range, she could probably detain the Constitution long enough to allow the other British warships to close the distance. Hull wrote: “It soon appeared that we must be taken, and that our Escape was impossible.” Morris said that “it was supposed that the first steady breeze would bring up such a force as would render resistance of no avail; and our situation seemed hopeless.” In his journal, Surgeon Amos Evans spoke of an “inexpressible anxiety” as the men had “given over all expectations of making our escape.” Midshipman Henry Gilliam, striving for literary effect, told his uncle that the situation was “pregnant with the most fatal consequences to our gallant ship.”

  Hull resolved to go down fighting. He told Lieutenant Morris he intended to lay the Constitution broadside to the pursuing squadron and trade cannon fire until the frigate was sunk. Moses Smith, speaking for the enlisted men, said: “we resolved to save ourselves from capture, or sink in the conflict…we were determined to a man that [the flag] should never go down but with the ship. Captain Hull saw and felt this patriotic feeling, and cherished it to the utmost.”

  It was at this moment that Lieutenant Morris suggested an unconventional tactic. The Constitution could attempt to “kedge” ahead. Kedging (or “warping”) was accomplished by running an anchor and long anchor cable ahead in a boat. The anchor was dropped and the cable hauled in by the capstan, thus moving the ship up to the position of the anchor. If two boats with two anchors worked simultaneously, the ship could advance without interruption. Kedging was generally used only in harbors or other inland waterways as a means of maneuvering a large ship through a crowded anchorage, a channel, or a tideway. To kedge at sea was virtually unheard of, because it could only be done in shallow water. But soundings had revealed that the depth of water was only 24 fathoms. With a long enough anchor cable, it might be possible. Why not try it? Hull agreed.

  Three or four hundred fathoms of spare rope—“all the spare rigging out of the boatswain’s store-room”—were spliced or bent to the anchor cables. In this manner the Constitution’s seamen constructed two cables, each nearly a mile long. Two small kedge anchors were lowered into the launch and the first cutter. The first boat dropped a kedge about half a mile ahead, and the men at the frigate’s capstan began hauling in the cable. The Constitution advanced at more than a knot of speed, and (Hull reported) “we began to gain ahead of the Enemy.”

  The British soon recognized the “Yankee trick” and imitated it. The Shannon kedged ahead smartly, and at one point seemed to gain on the Constitution. The Belvidera also employed the procedure. But the Constitution had an important advantage. If the pursuing frigates sent their boats too far ahead, whether kedging or towing, they came within dangerous range of the Constitution’s stern chasers. The British ships hung back, just out of range, waiting for a breeze that would allow them to resume the chase under sail.

  At 9:00 a.m., helped by a fleeting breeze, the Belvidera came up on the Constitution’s lee beam and fired several ranging shots. All the balls fell just short, serving only (said Lieutenant Morris) “to enliven our men and excite their jocular comments.” The Constitution’s stern guns fired in response. While Dr. Evans watched through a telescope, a cluster of men standing in the British frigate’s forecastle broke apart, dodging right and left, as one of the Constitution’s high-arching shots fell into “the midst of the group.” From that range, however, the force of the shot was spent, and it did no damage.

  The breeze again died off entirely, and the crew of the Constitution continued their laborious towing and kedging operations. The late morning sun beat down; the oppressive high summer heat and humidity closed around them; and a sickening, oily swell passed under the ship.

  The men sweated but they could not rest. The sails, still hanging lifelessly from the masts and yards, were manipulated to take advantage of every waft of air, no matter how feeble. The occasional “cat’s paw” of wind required that the boats—leading ahead to either drop the kedge anchors or tow the ship—be hoisted aboard while the Constitution was moving through the water. The exercise required flawless timing. Lieutenant Morris later explained that the boats were not hoisted all the way on deck, but rather suspended “to the spars in the chains by temporary tackles, with their crews in them, ready to act again at a moment’s notice.”

  Between ten and noon, Hull gave the order to dump the Constitution’s fresh water. As the men worked the chain pumps, some 2,335 gallons poured over the deck and shot through the scuppers. This raised the Constitution by approximately one inch. It was a small margin, but even a small margin might prove decisive.

  As the long, languid summer afternoon wore on, the officers and seamen of the Constitution were pushed to the point of exhaustion. Both watches were called up to work the ship, man the capstan bars, serve the cannon, or take the oars. Men took any opportunity to catch a wink of sleep, sometimes curling up at their battle stations, only to be roused by the call of the bosun’s pipe. At sunset, the British squadron was still in determined pursuit, just beyond cannon-shot range. The breeze remained weak and variable until eleven that evening, when a light but steady breeze sprang up from the south. Constitution and her pursuers set all sail.

  At dawn on July 19, two British frigates were almost on top of the Constitution. The Belvidera posed the greatest threat. She was abeam of the Constitution, to leeward. On Constitution’s weather quarter was the Aeolus. The three ships were close-hauled to a gentle breeze, still with only bare steerageway. Constitution tacked and passed well within range of the Aeolus, but the British ship did not fire, possibly because her captain feared that the recoil of the guns would impair the speed of his ship. It was an intense moment. A negligible shift in wind or current could decide the outcome of the race.

  Having been freshly overhauled, Constitution was surprisingly swift, and she gradually led ahead of her pursuers. As the morning wore on, the breeze grew “tolerably steady, though still light.” Hull ordered that the sails be wetted in order to make them hold the wind better. This required heavy buckets of seawater to be hoisted up to the highest parts of the rigging, and more backbreaking work for the exhausted crew.

  At nine in the morning, a new sail was seen inshore, to windward. She appeared to be an American merchantman. With hopes of luring the unidentified vessel into a trap, the Belvidera hoisted the Stars and Stripes. Hull countered by hoisting British colors. The American merchantman hauled her wind, turned stern-to, and escaped safely to one of the ports along the New Jersey shore.

  “At noon we had the wind abeam and as it gradually freshened, we began to leave our fleet pursuer,” said Lieutenant Morris. The Constitution tore through the sea with gratifying speed, leaving a long, foaming wake behind her. At 2:00 p.m., the log registered a speed of 12.5 knots. “Our hopes began to overcome apprehension, and cheerfulness was more apparent among us.”

  By six thirty that evening, a heavy rain squall approached from windward. The men raced aloft to take in the studding sails and royals before it hit. As the squall enveloped the ship, the men took in the skysails, topgallant sails, and flying jib, and the mizzen topsail and spanker were reefed. Just as quickly, as the violence of the squall passed over and obscured the Constitution from the enemy’s view, Hull ordered the men to make all sail and sheet home quickly. The Constitution cracked on to windward, extending her lead by about a mile.

  The wind moderated during the night. Although the men again slept at their battle stations, they rested easier than they had the night before. At daylight on July 20, it was clear that the Constitution was out of danger. The British hauled off to the northeast, giving up the pursuit.

  The three-day chase had been one of the longest and most desperate in the entire history of sail. By saving the Constitution, Hull had averted a capture that might have dealt a
devastating blow to the nation’s confidence and morale at the outset of the war. Though it was not a victory, the triumphant escape against heavy odds had revealed that the Royal Navy had no inherent advantage over the Americans in the mastery of seamanship. Afterward, the English officers conceded that the handling of the American frigate had been “elegant.”

  The Constitution had escaped capture after her officers and crew despaired of saving her. The life lesson, as Lieutenant Morris later put it in his Autobiography, was to keep faith in “the advantages to be expected from perseverance…so long as any chance for success may remain.”

  ON JULY 25, AS THE CONSTITUTION beat into a headwind toward Boston Light, Dr. Evans admired the “very romantic and picturesque” hills rising up from the capes and islands of Massachusetts Bay. Even from far down the fairway, the men on deck could see the steeples of several Boston churches and the dome of the Bulfinch State House, which was sheathed in Revere’s copper, as was the Constitution.

  Captain Hull had chosen to take the ship into Boston because the British now commanded the sea-lanes into New York. He was still under orders to rendezvous with Commodore Rodgers. In Boston, perhaps, he could learn of the American squadron’s whereabouts. Constitution also needed to replenish her depleted supplies, particularly the 10 tons of fresh water that had been dumped into the ocean. On the afternoon of July 26, Purser Thomas J. Chew took one of the frigate’s boats up the channel. He carried Hull’s dispatches to Secretary Hamilton and Commodore Rodgers, as well as a long list of supplies and provisions needed to prepare the Constitution for another cruise. The captain urged the local Navy Agent to “work night and day” to fill the Constitution’s stores. He wanted the ship ready to return to sea in three days.

  The next morning, Constitution was towed up the channel by her cutters. She anchored in President Roads, just below the fort at Castle Island. Almost immediately, a small flotilla of lighters began transferring provisions and casks of fresh water to the ship. Just before noon, Hull went ashore at Boston’s Long Wharf. As he walked up State Street, he was cheered by crowds of Bostonians who had heard reports of the Constitution’s escape. At the Exchange Coffee House (which served as a combined post office, conference center, newsstand, and social club for Boston’s merchants and sea officers), Hull took up a pen and wrote the following message in the public register of shipping news: