Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Captain Hull, finding his friends in Boston are correctly informed of his situation when chased by the British squadron off New York…takes this opportunity of requesting them to make a transfer of a great part of their good wishes to Lt. Morris, and the other brave officers, and the crew under his command, for their very great exertions and prompt attention to orders while the enemy were in chase.

  The Federalist influence was strong in Boston, however, and there was considerable local sentiment against the war. Surgeon Amos Evans browsed in several Boston bookshops, where he found “plenty of sermons in pamphlet form, & pieces against ‘Maddison’s ruinous war,’ as they call it.” Writing in his journal, Dr. Evans wondered whether New England could be counted on to provide any support to the war effort. “Judging from present symptoms, I fear not.”

  Boston was buzzing with rumors about the presence of British naval forces off the New England coast. No one yet knew what Commodore Broke had done after losing the Constitution; it was feared that he might move north to blockade Boston. (In fact, Broke’s squadron had sailed to the West Indies to intercept and protect the hundred-sail Jamaica convoy.) There were reports that the British frigate Maidstone was cruising just off Cape Cod, and had captured several American fishing vessels. Other reports referred to two British frigates operating in Massachusetts Bay itself, or a little eastward of Cape Ann.

  Hull had good reasons to hurry the Constitution back to sea. Apart from the rule that a ship at sea was a better weapon than a ship in port, there was the constant possibility that a strong British blockading force would arrive to cut off her escape. To these were added a third, unspoken consideration. William Bainbridge, who stood senior to Hull on the captain’s list, was stationed in Charlestown as commanding officer of the Navy Yard, where the frigate Chesapeake was undergoing repairs. Before the war, Bainbridge had been notified that he would be given the command of the Constellation, still fitting out at the Washington Navy Yard. But since Constitution was a larger ship than her sisters Chesapeake and Constellation, Bainbridge, by the iron rule of seniority, should have been entitled to supersede Hull in command of her. It seems that both Hull and Bainbridge expected precisely such orders to arrive from Secretary Hamilton at any moment. If Constitution sailed without orders, however, Hull would have the opportunity to make a successful cruise before being obliged to relinquish the ship.

  While preparations for sea continued, Hull wrote Secretary Hamilton to justify his imminent departure: “Should I proceed to Sea without your further orders, and it should not meet your approbation, I shall be very unhappy…I shall act as at this moment I believe you would order me to do, was it possible for me to receive orders from you.” He intended to take the Constitution in search of Rodgers. If he did not find Rodgers, he would “continue cruizing where (from information I may collect) I shall be most likely to distress the Enemy.” At the same time, Hull was telling his father that “I may not return for some time.” Further, he took same spare moments to shop for nautical charts in Boston, and purchased charts covering not only the North Atlantic but also Brazil, the Rio de la Plata, Africa, and the Spanish Main. Was Hull planning a long, unauthorized cruise far from American shores?

  On Sunday, August 2, a week after arriving in Boston, Hull wrote a second letter to Hamilton. The wind having “hawled so far to the Westward as to enable us to fetch out,” the captain had decided to “take a responsibility on myself.” The Constitution would depart Boston in order to avoid a blockade that might trap her in port for several months. “These Sir, are the Motives that have led me to take the Steps I have,” he concluded, “and should they not meet your approbation I shall truly be unfortunate.”

  THE CREW SHIPPED THE CAPSTAN BARS and hove up the anchors, and the big frigate went down Boston’s long, intricate fairway, threading the channel through the dozens of neatly cultivated islands, passing the lighthouse and putting to sea. In spite of the war, Massachusetts Bay was dotted with small sails; Dr. Evans counted fifty around the horizon. At 11:30 a.m., Hull ordered the sails sheeted in, and the Constitution hauled off to the northeast, toward the English shipping lanes off Halifax and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  In the following two weeks, Constitution sailed north and east along the coast of Maine as far as the Bay of Fundy, then crossed to Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. With heavy fog hanging over the sea, the Constitution’s lookout saw no ships for days on end. Bearing away to the east, passing near the Isle of Sables and Cape Race in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Constitution entered the shipping lanes that would carry men and war materiel from England to the maritime provinces for the defense of Canada. Here she had more success, capturing two English merchant brigs on August 10 and August 11. Rather than man these prizes and send them into American ports for prize court adjudication, Hull chose to burn them. In so doing, he eschewed the prize money they offered, revealing that his ultimate purpose was to meet an English man-of-war while the Constitution was at full fighting strength.

  On August 15, the lookout caught sight of five sail in the southeast, and Constitution set all sail in chase. An English sloop of war had captured several American merchantmen. The sloop escaped, but the Constitution recaptured the merchantmen and took their prize crews prisoner. From the prisoners, Hull learned that several well-known British frigates of the Halifax station, including Belvidera, Guerrière, Shannon, and Aeolus, had turned back toward the North American coast after escorting the Jamaican convoy into the mid-Atlantic. Not wishing for another close encounter with the entire British squadron, Hull stretched away to the south, toward Bermuda.

  The night of Sunday, August 16, in rainy and foggy weather, Constitution overhauled a 14-gun privateer brig out of Salem, the Decatur, named for Hull’s colleague, Stephen Decatur. The Decatur had been chased by the 44-gun British frigate Guerrière about 100 miles to the south. The Constitution steered southward in search of her.

  At 2:00 p.m. on August 19, in 41° 42' North by 55° 48' West—about 750 miles east of Boston—the lookout caught sight of a big, full-rigged ship on the southern horizon. She was on a starboard tack, close-hauled to the wind under easy sail. Captain Hull gave one of the midshipmen his telescope and sent him aloft. The midshipman hailed the deck to report that the stranger was a “tremendous ship.” Hull gave the order to beat to quarters, and the crew of the Constitution, wrote Able Seaman Moses Smith, came “flocking up like pigeons from a net bed. From the spar deck to the gun deck, and from that to the berth deck, every man was roused and on his feet.”

  The stranger was indeed the Guerrière, commanded by twenty-eight-year-old Captain James R. Dacres. She had been ordered away from Broke’s squadron to sail for Halifax on August 6. The two frigates, on opposite tacks, closed rapidly.

  As Guerrière approached, the Americans could make out four words painted across her foretopsail: “NOT THE LITTLE BELT.” She was not, in other words, the 20-gun corvette that John Rodgers (in President) had nearly sunk in a night action the previous year, having mistaken her for the Guerrière. That incident had left Dacres and the other officers of the Guerrière feeling as if they had a personal score to settle with the Americans. Three days earlier, Dacres had written out a challenge in the register of a merchant brig, inbound to New York: “The Guerrière, 44 guns, and 300 men, will be happy to see the President, Commodore Rodgers, outside the Hook, or any other of the large frigates, to have a sociable tête-à-tête.” Now, as the Guerrière and Constitution maneuvered for position, Captain Dacres announced to his crew that he expected to take the Constitution in thirty minutes or less and would be “offended with them if they did not do their business in that time.” At about the same time, a barrel of molasses was hoisted into the Guerrière’s rigging. The British had vowed to make “switchel,” a syrupy beverage popular in New England, for the prisoners they soon expected to have locked in the hold.

  The taunts were examples of the hubris that had seeped into the culture of the Royal Navy in the later stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Tho
ugh Dacres was only twenty-eight years old, he was an experienced commander, having won promotion to post rank at twenty-two. A month earlier, during the long chase off the New Jersey shore, he had taken a good look at the Constitution. He must have known she was larger and more heavily armed than the Guerrière, and he could not have any doubt that she was well handled. It was Captain Dacres’s business to know these things, and yet the option of running from the Constitution never seems to have entered his mind. The idea that a British frigate could be beaten by an American ship of anything resembling equivalent force was simply beneath serious consideration. To flee the Constitution would have exposed Dacres to the calumny of his colleagues, his superiors, and the entire British public. He would have faced a court-martial and very likely been stripped of his rank.

  When the two frigates had closed to within about two miles, the Guerrière hauled up the English colors and fired a gun. Constitution stood on to leeward before the freshening northeast breeze, wearing double-reefed topsails and courses, with her royal yards struck down on deck. The British ship yawed, first to port, then to starboard, and fired two long-range broadsides. Most of the balls splashed into the sea or passed harmlessly through the Constitution’s rigging. An 18-pounder shot hit home near the larboard knight-head; another struck the foremast and cut clean through a fish hoop (one of the bands encircling the lower masts). Midshipman Gilliam said of this long-ranging cannon fire, “we paid very little attention to it.”

  Dacres bore up to put the wind on the Guerrière’s quarter, placing her on the same tack as the Constitution. Both ships wore round several times in succession, as Dacres attempted to maneuver to windward of the Constitution and Hull maneuvered to keep Guerrière under his lee. For the next forty-five minutes the two ships ran on parallel courses, the Constitution steadily gaining on her adversary because she had spread more sail.

  At 6:00 p.m., the Constitution ranged up on the Guerrière’s weather quarter, about 200 yards away. As she came abeam of her adversary, the distance closed to about 75 yards. Aboard the Constitution, Moses Smith later recalled, there was an eerie, almost preternatural stillness. Occasionally a sound cut through the silence, as an officer shouted a command, or the rigging creaked, or a wave broke against the side of the ship, but there was no talking among the hands, and “Every man stood firm at his post.”

  One by one, as they came to bear on the Constitution, the Guerrière’s 18-pounders opened fire. A ball crashed through a gunport and dismounted a long gun, sending a shock through the Constitution’s deck that was strong enough to throw a man off his feet. First Lieutenant Morris asked: “Shall we return the fire?” But Captain Hull intended to open with a single, concentrated broadside at close range—one that would give full effect to the Constitution’s superior weight of metal—and he told Morris to wait. Slowly the Constitution came abeam of the enemy, and when all of the guns would bear, Hull ordered the jib hauled down and the main topsail backed against the mainmast to slow her speed. At 6:05 p.m., he turned to Morris, and said: “Yes sir, you may now fire.”

  The Constitution fired a double-shotted broadside at pistol-shot range. It was, Hull reported, “a very heavy fire from all of our Guns, loaded with round, and grape, which done great Execution.” The shock of the broadside sent tremors through the Constitution, so that the entire ship “shook from stem to stern. Every spar and yard in her was on a tremble.” Immediately after the guns were fired, the Constitution’s gun crews gave a triple cheer that was heard on the deck of the Guerrière.

  As the wind tore away the curtain of smoke, it was obvious that the first broadside had done its work. The Guerrière’s mizzenmast had ruptured a few feet above the main deck, and was crashing into the sea over the starboard quarter. Her mainyard had been shot away, taking the sail with it. This wreckage of spars and rigging, wrote Smith, was “hanging in great confusion over her sides, and dashing against her on the waves.” The American crew gave another triple cheer—they seized every excuse to give the triple cheer—and an anonymous voice shouted that the Guerrière had been converted into a brig, and would soon be converted into a sloop. Captain Hull reportedly split his breeches in climbing up onto the hammock netting to see the enemy. At the sight of the Guerrière’s mizzenmast going by the board, he exclaimed: “By God, that ship is ours!”

  The Guerrière’s fire fell off noticeably, as many of her gun crews had been ravaged. On the Constitution, the only damage suffered was in her rigging. Two fore royal halyards were shot away, bringing down one of the American ensigns. An Irish seaman named Dan Hogan picked up the flag, climbed the rigging, and secured it to the topmast. Several of the American boats, lashed upside down on the spar deck, were beaten to splinters. But the Constitution’s heavy planks and live oak frame provided good protection to the men who kept their heads down. As one of Guerrière’s 18-pounder balls bounced harmlessly back into the sea, a member of the Constitution’s crew exclaimed: “Her sides are made of iron!” The remark was later widely reported in the press, and the nickname stuck: “Old Ironsides.”

  The horrendous scene aboard the heavily outgunned Guerrière was later described by Benjamin Hodges, an American prisoner whose merchant vessel had been captured a few days earlier. The effect of the Constitution’s first broadside, he wrote, was like “a tremendous explosion…as if Heaven and Earth had struck together,” causing the Guerrière to “reel and tremble as though she had received the shock of an earthquake.” Hodges was stationed below, in the surgeon’s cockpit, where he had agreed to help cope with the English wounded. Shortly after the Constitution opened fire, he said, rivulets of blood began running down the ladders “as freely as if a washtub-full had been turned over.” Fifteen or twenty wounded officers and seamen were carried down to the cockpit, some missing an arm or leg. Hodges was impressed by the mordant good humor of the wounded men. A British officer, while the surgeon’s saw was actually moving through his arm, called out to another casualty who was being carried down: “Well, shipmate, how goes the battle?”

  With her mizzenmast trailing in the sea, Guerrière’s helmsman was powerless to prevent the frigate from turning up into the wind, toward the Constitution. This allowed the American ship to draw ahead and luff short round the British ship’s larboard bow, assuming a raking position from which the marine riflemen in her foretop could sweep the Guerrière’s decks. The engagement was rapidly turning into a rout. Surging ahead and wearing round, the Constitution brought her larboard battery into action, and poured out a raking broadside.

  Dacres realized that his last hope was to run the Constitution aboard and send a boarding party over the rail to carry the American frigate in hand-to-hand combat. The Guerrière luffed into the wind; her bow came into contact with Constitution’s larboard quarter; her bowsprit crossed over the American ship’s taffrail and entangled in the mizzen shrouds. Clasped together, the frigates rotated counterclockwise in a lethal waltz. The gun crews serving the Englishman’s two bow chasers kept up a vigorous fire, killing two members of one of the Constitution’s aftermost gun crews. One of the Guerrière’s 18-pounder long guns was run out and fired at point-blank range through a stern window of Captain Hull’s cabin. Either the shot or a flaming wad from the cannon ignited a fire, which an American fire crew rushed aft to extinguish.

  Dacres and Hull each gave the order to rally a boarding party. On both ships, heavily armed men pressed toward the point where the vessels were in contact. “One might see the whites of the eyes, and count the teeth of the enemy,” said Moses Smith. On Constitution’s quarterdeck, Marine Lieutenant William S. Bush leaped up onto the taffrail, sword in hand, and was shot in the face. The musket ball entered his left cheek, traveled through his brain, and exited the back of his head. He was killed instantly, and fell back to the deck. First Lieutenant Morris thought an “advantage” might be gained by securing the enemy’s bowsprit to the after rigging, so as to lock the Guerrière in a position from which she could be raked fore and aft by the Constitution’s l
arboard broadside. Morris climbed up to the same exposed position in which Bush had just been killed, and was reaching up to “pass some turns of the main brace” over the Guerrière’s bowsprit when he was shot through the abdomen and fell back to the quarterdeck. At about the same time, Constitution’s sailing master, John Cushing Aylwin, was shot in the shoulder.

  The British officers also suffered. The Constitution’s raking fire cut down the first, second, and third lieutenants, a marine lieutenant, and three midshipmen. The sailing master was shot through the knee. The Guerrière’s petty officers rose to the occasion, stepping into the command roles vacated by the wounded commissioned officers. The sailing master’s mate and an acting purser assumed command of some of the gun crews. The American stern guns continued to fire and reload in rapid succession, and they wreaked devastation along the full length of the Guerrière. The barrel of molasses that had been hoisted on the main stay was shattered, and the contents emptied onto the British deck.

  A high sea was running, and both ships were heaving and plunging. The Guerrière’s long bowsprit tore free of the Constitution’s mizzen rigging and the ships separated. At about the same time, the Guerrière’s teetering foremast went by the board, and its weight dragged the mainmast over the side with it. Now there was not a spar left standing in the British ship. Fulfilling the earlier prediction of that prescient sailor aboard the Constitution, the Guerrière had been transformed from a frigate into a brig, then into a sloop, and finally into a hulk.