by Ian W. Toll
Spreading a huge expanse of canvas in the mild breeze, Chesapeake outsailed the yachts, schooners, and sloops, filled with civilian well-wishers, that had followed her into the bay. Her sides were gleaming with a fresh coat of paint, and she was dressed for the occasion, with three ensigns flying in the main and mizzen rigging, and at the forepeak a long white banner emblazoned with the words “FREE TRADE AND SAILORS’ RIGHTS.” In Boston, a grand victory banquet was being prepared in honor of Captain Lawrence and his soon-to-be victorious officers, and a length of wharf was kept clear for the soon-to-be captured Shannon. Crowds of spectators climbed the hills and headlands of Cape Ann and Cape Cod and were “striving to catch a glimpse of the capture of the British frigate.”
The two ships were a near-perfect match. Their length on deck was virtually the same; each carried a gun deck battery of twenty-eight long 18-pounders; and their armament on the upper decks was about the same. The Chesapeake’s only advantage was in her number of crew—379 men against the Shannon’s 330.
Aboard the Shannon, Commodore Broke wore a black top hat and a heavy Scottish broadsword, which hung from a shoulder strap. When asked if the Shannon should hoist more flags and bunting to match the colorfully decorated appearance of the Chesapeake, he answered: “No, sir. We have always been a modest ship; one flag is enough for us, but as I know you never intend it to come down, it shall be lashed to the peak.” It was an audacious order, one that might cost many lives if the Shannon found herself beaten and incapable of asking for quarter. Calling his crew back to the waist, Broke made a terse speech:
Shannons, you know that from various causes the Americans have lately triumphed on several occasions over the British Flag in our frigates…they have said, and they have published in their papers, that the English have forgotten the way to fight. You will let them know today that there are Englishmen in the Shannon who still know how to fight.
Don’t try to dismast her. Fire into her quarters; main-deck into the main-deck; quarter-deck into the quarter-deck. Kill the men and the ship is yours. Don’t hit them about the head for they wear steel caps, but give it to them through the body. Don’t cheer. Go quietly to your quarters. I feel sure you will all do your duty, and remember that you now have the blood of your countrymen to avenge.
At 4:50 p.m., the adversaries were separated by about two miles. Lawrence ordered the Chesapeake’s light sails taken in and her royal yards struck down on deck. Broke decided to leave the Shannon’s royals crossed, guessing that the breeze would die off at sunset. Chesapeake was closing with Shannon from windward, so Lawrence had the potentially decisive advantage of the weather gauge. Broke made no effort to maneuver the Shannon into a better position. Lawrence recognized that his opponent was deliberately conceding a valuable advantage, and he refused to accept it. Communicating by means of a seaman’s unspoken language, the commanders agreed to dispense with all pre-combat maneuvers. Shannon would not fire on the Chesapeake as she came downwind, and Chesapeake would not exploit the weather gauge in order to rake the Shannon. It could have been a medieval jousting match. Afterward, the English officers praised Lawrence for his gallantry, but as Midshipman Raymond of the Shannon later wrote, “He certainly came down in a most brave and officer-like manner, but he was too confident.”
At five forty-five, Chesapeake closed to a distance of 50 yards on the Shannon’s weather quarter. Lawrence shouted to the helmsman: “Luff her!” and the Chesapeake immediately threw her head into the wind and ranged up abeam of her enemy. The crew of the Shannon could hear the order given on the American ship, and they were ready at the starboard guns. The action did not commence with a single dramatic broadside on either side, but with the deep concussive thuds of the great guns keying in individually, as each came to bear on its target, accompanied by the high-pitched crackle of the muskets and swivel guns. After the first few seconds, there was only a wall of sound: a continuous, earsplitting roar.
Shot crashed through the Chesapeake’s rigging, cutting many of her forward shrouds and braces to ribbons; shrapnel-like clouds of splinters were blasted out of the interior walls of her bulwarks, where the Englishman’s round shot struck. A swath of grape and canister shot swept across the quarterdeck, killing or wounding many of the American officers in the first two minutes of action. The sailing master was killed outright; the helmsman was killed; Lieutenant White’s head was blown off; Captain Lawrence took a musket ball under his right knee and clutched the binnacle to keep his feet. A man stepped forward to replace the fallen helmsman, and was killed. A third stepped forward, and a direct hit from one of the Shannon’s 9-pounder pivot guns killed him and also smashed the Chesapeake’s wheel to pieces. Out of the 150 men stationed on the Chesapeake’s spar deck, 100 were killed or wounded in the first two minutes of the action. Among the fallen were nearly all the American officers.
The Shannon suffered as well, particularly from the rapid, well-aimed fire of the Chesapeake’s 18-pounders and the marine sharpshooters stationed in the tops. A round shot struck the chocking quoin of one of Shannon’s quarterdeck carronades and launched it toward Broke, missing him by inches and shattering the gun captain’s knee. Another man stationed on the main deck was struck in the midsection by a round of grape—he refused to be carried down to the surgeon, but invited his mates to reach into the wound and pull out the shot. The Shannon’s helmsman, a Trafalgar veteran, was struck in the wrist and nearly lost his arm, but stayed at the wheel. A dozen or more dead men were thrown from the gunports into the sea. But the Shannon, unlike the Chesapeake, had not yet lost any of her senior officers, and her internal command structure remained intact.
From the moment she had luffed up, the Chesapeake had kept more speed through the water than the Shannon, and she continued to range ahead, until her forward guns could no longer bear on her adversary. The damage to her fore rigging made her headsails unmanageable, and they flapped uselessly in the breeze. This, combined with the loss of the helm and helmsmen, left the Chesapeake at the mercy of events. She turned her quarter to the Shannon, flew up into the wind, lost her headway, was taken aback, and began to gather stern way. That is to say, Chesapeake actually began to travel backward through the water, directly toward the British ship. As the distance closed, the Shannon’s gun crews and topmen kept up a relentless fire, and the unprotected quarter-deck of the Chesapeake became as inhospitable to human life as the surface of the moon. First Lieutenant Ludlow was killed; the lieutenant of marines was killed; Lawrence was wounded but still on his feet when he received a second, more deadly wound in his groin, fell to the deck, and was yanked through the after hatch by his third lieutenant. Every officer, seaman, or marine stationed aft of the mizzenmast was soon taken down by the marksmen firing from the Shannon’s fore and maintops. A witness compared the combined effect of the English grape shot, canister shot, and musketry to a “pelting gale.”
Drifting helplessly, the Chesapeake’s stern came into contact with the Shannon amidships, and her mizzenyard fouled in the British frigate’s fore rigging. Shannon had a sheet anchor stowed in her mainchains, and the fluke of this anchor smashed the Chesapeake’s quarter-gallery window, entered Lawrence’s cabin, and temporarily locked the ships together. Captain Broke, stationed on the Shannon’s gangway near the point of impact, and seeing the American quarterdeck strewn with bodies and otherwise abandoned, called for boarders. The boatswain attempted to lash the ships together, passing a brace over the Chesapeake’s taffrail, but one of the Americans in the greatcabin saw what he was doing, reached up through the quarter gallery with a cutlass, and began hacking ferociously at the man’s arm. The limb was severed completely, and splashed into the sea between the two ships. Still the Chesapeake could not get clear; the wind kept her stern pressed firmly against the Shannon.
As the mortally wounded Lawrence was carried to the surgeon’s cockpit, he called for boarders—but the bugler, whose responsibility it was to sound the call, had fled his station in terror. The order passed haphazardly t
hrough the gun deck, by word of mouth, and the remaining lieutenants and midshipmen did their best to rally a boarding party. But there was not enough time. Not a single living officer was left on the spar deck, and confusion reigned throughout the Chesapeake. The men crowded forward or fled belowdecks, and any man brave enough to charge up through the Chesapeake’s main or after hatches was cut down instantly in a hailstorm of enemy fire.
A grenade lobbed from the Shannon—by some reports, thrown by Broke himself—landed in an open chest of musket cartridges, which blew up and enveloped the quarterdeck in a cloud of thick, white, billowing smoke. A party of boarders, armed with pikes, pistols, and cutlasses, had collected on the Shannon’s gangway. Broke shouted, “Follow me, who can!” and climbed over the hammock nettings; he reached his foot across to the roof of the Chesapeake’s quarter gallery, shifted his weight across; stepped on the muzzle of the American ship’s aftermost carronade, pulled himself over her bulwark, drew his service sword, and dropped to her deserted quarterdeck. He was the first of the Shannon’s crew to board, followed close behind by his first lieutenant and about thirty others.
The Chesapeake’s chaplain, Samuel Livermore, fired a pistol at Broke from close range, but missed. Broke slashed at him, gouging a deep wound in the clergyman’s arm, and charged forward along the gangway, slashing and hacking at the few seamen and marines he met, his men following close behind. The boarders drove the remaining defenders forward into the forecastle. With no officers to rally them, most of the Americans succumbed to panic, crowding down the forward hatch or vaulting over the rail and through the bridle ports to the relative safety of the gun deck.
Below, Captain Lawrence lay mortally wounded in the cockpit. He refused medical treatment, and continued to demand that his officers rally a boarding party. But when we saw the rush of panicked seamen coming down the ladders, Lawrence realized all was lost. “Don’t give up the ship,” he cried, to anyone who would listen: “Fight her till she sinks.” He repeated the order again and again; and finally: “Don’t give up the ship. Blow her up.” The order, which no seaman could fail to understand, was to strike a match and throw it into the Chesapeake’s magazine. Don’t give up the ship. It was strange that these dying words, comprising an order (not obeyed) to commit mass suicide, were subsequently adopted as the navy’s unofficial motto. They were not the kind of words that were spoken with posterity in mind; they were never intended to be quoted or even remembered. Don’t give up the ship. This was the final, despairing roar of a man who was bleeding to death, a man who had fought gallantly but ineffectively, losing a valuable ship to a thirty-man boarding party in an action lasting less than fifteen minutes.
While the British took control of the Chesapeake’s upper deck, the marines and swivel men in the American frigate’s fighting tops continued to fire down on Broke and his men. Broke shouted up to the midshipmen commanding the Shannon’s tops to silence this deadly fire from their American counterparts, and the Shannon’s topmen showed extraordinary courage in carrying out the order. The captain of the English ship’s maintop, finding his view of the enemy veiled by the Shannon’s topsail, crawled out to the end of the main yardarm, and from that vantage point picked off three men in the American mizzentop. The captain of the Shannon’s foretop, Midshipman Smith, actually led a boarding party of five men across her foreyard, and with a heaving sea 50 feet beneath his feet leaped across to the end of the Chesapeake’s foreyard. Sword in hand, Smith stormed the Chesapeake’s foretop, killed several of the Americans he found there, and drove the rest down on deck, where they surrendered to Broke and his party.
A melee continued in the forecastle, as a few Americans managed to force themselves up the fore hatch. Broke found himself fending off the combined assault of three American sailors. One thrust at him with a pike; he parried the blow with his sword, but could not get out of the way of a musket swung at his head. The blow sent him reeling, and in his daze he could do nothing to defend himself against the third man, who struck him hard in the forehead with a cutlass. A long flap of scalp was peeled back from Broke’s skull, and about three inches of his brain cavity were exposed to view. A British marine rushed into the fray and bayoneted the American armed with the cutlass; the others were driven back and surrendered. At the same moment that Lawrence, below, was exhorting his men not to give up the ship, the British boarders were herding the surrendered prisoners down the hatches and securing the gratings over them.
The boarding party had paid a heavy price, with more than two thirds of the British seamen and marines who followed Broke onto the Chesapeake killed or wounded. The battle ended messily, as boarding actions often did. Some of the Americans fired their weapons up the hatches, killing a British marine; Broke told his men to fire down the hatches until the Americans called for quarter, and by some reports the British continued firing even after repeated cries of surrender, and even aimed shots into the surgeon’s cockpit where dozens of helpless men lay wounded. There were reports of wounded Americans being executed outright while lying on deck. One of the American midshipmen stationed in the rigging later testified that a British lieutenant ordered his men to throw him overboard, though he was unarmed and had surrendered. Lieutenant Watt, first lieutenant of the Shannon, had hauled down the American ensign and was attempting to hoist the British colors when he was accidentally killed by a grape shot fired by one of the Shannon’s carronades. Four or five other British seamen were similarly killed by friendly fire in the closing minutes of the action.
When the flotilla of spectator boats, some as close as a mile and a half away, saw the British ensign raised to the Chesapeake’s mizzen peak, they hauled their wind and hurried back into Boston Harbor.
It had been the bloodiest naval action of the war, one of the bloodiest of any war up to that date. Two hundred and twenty-eight men lay dead or wounded, and many of the wounds were mortal. Shannon had suffered twenty-three killed and fifty-eight wounded; Chesapeake recorded forty-eight killed and ninety-nine wounded, and another twenty-three of the combined wounded would die in the following days and weeks. Among the Chesapeake’s casualties were most of her officers, including her captain; her first, second, third, and fourth lieutenants; her lieutenant of marines; seven midshipmen; her sailing master; and more than twenty petty officers. A witness described the appearance of the Chesapeake’s spar deck: “the coils and folds of rope were steeped in gore as if in a slaughter house…. Pieces of skin, with pendant hair, were adhering to the sides of the ship, and in one place I noticed portions of fingers protruding, as if thrust through the outer wall of the frigate.”
Most of the casualties on both sides had been killed or wounded by small arms fire. As a result, neither ship suffered severe damage. No spars had been shot away in either frigate; and although each had taken several round shots in the hull, the punctures in each case were above the waterline, and neither was leaking badly. “Both Ships came out of Action in the most beautiful order,” said the British battle report, “their Rigging appearing as perfect as if they had only been Exchanging a Salute.”
The Shannon was the better ship, and Broke the better commander. The British deserved to prevail, and they did. But the Chesapeake-Shannon action also demonstrated the principle that a single stroke of bad luck can quickly turn decisive. Had the Chesapeake not lost her headsails at the outset of the action, causing her to luff up into the wind and exposing her quarterdeck to a savage, raking fire, the result might have been very different. Similarly, if Lawrence had maneuvered to his full advantage in the early part of the action, Broke’s boarding action might never have been possible. The casualties inflicted on the Shannon by the Chesapeake’s early cannonade were severe enough to suggest a battle of running broadsides might have been decided in the American ship’s favor.
Two hours after the last gun had been fired, the Shannon and her prize were ready to sail for Halifax. They remained in close company during the five-day passage, the Shannon making a fair amount of water on the la
rboard tack but no more than usual on the starboard tack. Lawrence’s wound was bound up as tightly as possible, but he continued to lose blood, and died on June 5. The British wrapped his body in the Chesapeake’s ensign. At Halifax he would be buried with full military honors, with six officers of the Royal Navy serving as his pallbearers. Broke’s gruesome head wound was pronounced mortal by the surgeon, but he continued to hang on, immobilized on a stretcher in his cabin. He even managed to speak, though only in monosyllables.
The two frigates reached Halifax on June 6, a Sunday morning, when many of the town’s residents were at religious services. At St. Paul’s Church, according to a contemporary account, a man entered and whispered loudly to an acquaintance sitting near the back. The news “flew from pew to pew,” and a moment later, ignoring the pastor, the worshippers poured out of the church and ran down to the harbor. As Chesapeake came into view, making her way down the long harbor toward the Navy Yard on the western shore, her American colors were plainly visible and above them the white ensign of St. George. Every wharf and housetop “was crowded with groups of excited people, and as the ships successively passed, they were greeted with vociferous cheers.” Bells were rung in every belfry in Halifax; before long, they would be ringing all over England. Broke had done it; the doubts could be laughed away; the Royal Navy’s honor was saved, and the world that had been turned upside down, in those few disturbing months of 1812, had at last rotated back to its right side up.
