1812: The Navy's War

by George Daughan

  The kedging allowed the Constitution to gradually pull ahead, but the British saw what Hull was doing, and they began using kedge anchors themselves. The ships farthest behind sent their boats to tow and warp those nearest the Constitution . Soon they were again getting closer to Hull. At nine o’clock the nearest ship, the Belvidera, began firing her bow guns. Hull replied with the stern chasers from his cabin and the quarterdeck. The Belvidera’s balls fell short, but Hull thought a couple of his hit home because he could not see them strike the water. Soon, H.M.S. Guerriere (the single ship Hull’s lookout had spotted before) pulled close enough to unload a broadside, but her balls all fell short. She quickly ceased firing and resumed the chase.

  For the next three hours all hands on the Constitution were at the backbreaking task of warping the ship ahead with the heavy kedge anchors. To lighten and trim the ship, Hull pumped 2,300 gallons of drinking water—out of a total of almost 40,000—overboard, and with the help of a light air he gained a bit on his hounds.

  The British redoubled their efforts. At two o’clock in the afternoon all the boats from the battleship Africa and some from the frigates were sent to tow the Shannon. But as luck would have it, a providential breeze sprang up that enabled Hull to maintain his lead. The light wind stayed with the Constitution until eleven o’clock that night, and with her boats towing, she was able to keep ahead of the Shannon. Shortly after eleven, the Constitution caught a strengthening southerly wind that brought her abreast of her boats, which she hoisted up without losing any speed. Her pursuers were still near, but she was holding her own. To keep up, the Shannon abandoned her boats as the wind took her.

  The ships sailed through the second night of their engagement with Hull maintaining his lead by employing every device he could think of. A portion of the log read: “At midnight moderate breeze and pleasant, took in the royal studding sails.... At 1 A.M. set the sky sails [they had just been installed at the Washington Navy Yard]. At [1:30] got a pull of the weather brace and set the lower [studding] sail. At 3 A.M. set the main topmast studding sail. At [4:15] hauled up to SE by S.” And so it went, as Hull, the great maestro, employed every instrument at his command.

  At daylight on the nineteenth, six enemy ships were still visible. Hull now had to tack to the east, and in doing so, he passed close to the 32-gun Aeolus. The Constitution braced for a broadside, but the British frigate held her fire. Perhaps she feared becalming, “as the wind was light,” Hull speculated. In any event, after the Constitution passed, the Aeolus tacked and commenced her pursuit again.

  At 9 A.M. an innocent American merchantman happened on the scene. The British ships instantly hoisted American colors to decoy her toward them. Hull responded by hoisting British colors. The merchantman’s skipper correctly assessed the situation, hauled his wind, and raced away.

  As the day progressed, the wind increased, and the Constitution gained on her pursuers, lengthening her lead to as much as eight miles, but Broke kept after her—all through the day and night.

  At daylight on the twentieth, only three pursuers were visible from the Constitution’s main masthead, the nearest being twelve miles astern. Hull set all hands to work wetting the sails, from the royals down, “with the engine and fire buckets, and we soon found that we left the enemy very fast,” Hull reported.

  Commodore Broke recognized that even his lead ships were falling behind at an increasing rate, and at 8:15 he conceded the superior seamanship of the American and gave up the chase.

  When Hull saw Broke hauling his wind and heading off to the north, he was enormously proud of his crew. They might have been green, but in a grueling, fifty-seven-hour chase, they had outsailed every one of Broke’s ships. It was an amazing display of seamanship, stamina, collaborative effort, and, indeed, patriotism. And especially so when one considers that Commodore Broke was among the best in the business. The Constitution’s crew had beaten Britain’s finest.

  Having won this singular race in spectacular fashion, Hull now decided to make for Boston instead of New York, where his orders had directed him to go. He assumed Broke would be steering toward Sandy Hook to begin a blockade of New York, and he certainly did not want to run into him again.

  After Hull’s incredible escape, the legend of his sailing prowess grew, and a story began circulating that during the Quasi-War with France, First Lieutenant Hull, then aboard the Constitution, had demonstrated that he was among the foremost sailing masters of his day. Britain and America had been quasi-allies against France at the time, and the Constitution’s skipper, Commodore Silas Talbot, had become engaged in a friendly race with the captain of the British frigate H.M.S. Santa Margaretta. The competition ran from sunup to sunset, with Hull serving as the Constitution’s sailing master. Long after the incident, James Fenimore Cooper wrote, “the manner in which the Constitution beat her companion out of the wind was not the least striking feature of this trial, and it must in great degree be subscribed to Hull, whose dexterity in handling a craft under her canvas was remarkable . . . he was perhaps one of the most skilful seamen of his time.” Needless to say, the Constitution won the race.

  Inevitably, details were exaggerated: Hull was actually second lieutenant, not first, and this story was told to Cooper many years later by some surviving officers of the Constitution, including Hull. Even so, Hull’s prowess as a sailor was unquestionable. He might well have been the finest seaman in the American navy and perhaps in the world. In any event, Hull’s fledgling crew now had an esprit de corps that would have been the envy of any British captain.

  WHILE HULL WAS eluding Broke, David Porter continued his cruise in the Essex. Two days after encountering the troop convoy, he captured the brig Lamprey, carrying rum from Jamaica to Halifax via Bermuda. He put a prize crew aboard and sent her into Baltimore to be condemned. Then, between July 26 and August 9, he took six more prizes. Two of them, the Hero and the Mary, he burned, as they were of little value; another, the Nancy, he ransomed for $14,000; and two others, the Leander and the King George, he sent into port as prizes.

  On August 9 Porter seized his last prize, the brig Brothers. She had only recently been captured by Revolutionary War hero Joshua Barney in the privateer schooner Rossie. After seizing the Brothers, Barney had placed sixty-two prisoners aboard her—including men from five other vessels he had taken. Barney had then sent the Brothers on to St. John’s, Newfoundland, as a cartel vessel (a ship carrying only a signal gun whose sole purpose was to effect a prisoner exchange). Porter now added twenty-five prisoners of his own and sent all of them in the Brothers to St. John’s, under the charge of midshipman Stephen Decatur McKnight (Commodore Decatur’s nephew).

  When McKnight arrived at St. John’s, the admiral in command, Sir John T. Duckworth, was none too happy. In making the Brothers a cartel vessel, Porter was attempting to affect an unorthodox prisoner exchange, which Duckworth protested in letters sent to Porter and to Secretary Hamilton. The admiral pointed out that by giving the Brothers a flag of truce and a proposal for an exchange of prisoners, she was insulated from possible recapture, while the Essex, without a diminished crew, could continue her rampage unencumbered.

  As it turned out, the prisoners seized the Brothers from McKnight and put into another port on the island, but allowed McKnight to travel to St. John’s. When he met Admiral Duckworth, all he could do was hand him a list of names but no actual British prisoners. Nonetheless, Duckworth magnanimously acknowledged receipt of the British seamen and sent McKnight to Vice Admiral Sawyer, in Halifax, with a request that Sawyer see that McKnight got home, which Sawyer did. McKnight was saved from a dreadful incarceration aboard a prison ship in Halifax harbor. When he reached the United States, he rejoined the Essex.

  Four days after sending the Brothers to St. John’s, Porter was on the quarterdeck at 9:30 A.M. when lookouts shouted down to him that a merchantman was in sight to windward. He extended his telescope and had a good look at her. She appeared to be an English West Indiaman. But the more he examin
ed her, the more suspicious he got. “Every means had been used to give her that appearance,” he wrote. Suspecting she was really a warship in disguise, he quietly sent the crew to battle stations, while “concealing every appearance of preparation.” He kept the gun deck ports closed, the topgallant masts housed, and the sails set and trimmed in the careless manner of a merchantman. Since the Essex was small and lightly sparred, when her gun ports were closed, she looked—from a distance—more like a merchant vessel than a warship.

  Porter was right about the stranger’s identity. The ship rushing toward him was the 18-gun British sloop of war Alert, under Thomas L. P. Laugharne. Either Laugharne was taken in by the Essex’s disguise, or in the finest British tradition—going back to Sir Francis Drake—he was defying the odds and continuing his mad dash toward the much larger frigate, bent on evening the odds by surprising her and hitting her hard before she knew what was up.

  Porter held his fire and let Laugharne approach. By 11:30 the Alert was within short pistol shot, preparing to rake the Essex, when Porter suddenly ran up American colors and wore short around. While he did, the Alert unloaded a full broadside, which, Porter said, “did us no more injury than the cheers that accompanied it.”

  The Essex’s larboard guns then exploded, carronades firing in unison, their heavy metal smashing into the Alert from point-blank range. Stunned by the broadside, Laugharne tried to escape, but Porter was on him, ranging up close on the sloop’s starboard quarter. As he came up, Porter hoisted a flag bearing the motto, “FREE TRADE AND SAILORS RIGHTS.” Another broadside or two at this distance would have been devastating, and so, with five men wounded, two guns disabled, the ship badly cut up and sinking, and his crew having deserted their stations and run below, Laugharne, according to Porter, “avoided the dreadful consequences that our broadside would in a few moments have produced by prudentially striking his colors.”

  The entire action took eight minutes. Porter passed off the victory as a “trifling skirmish.” The only injury the Essex sustained was “having her cabin windows broken by the concussion of her own guns.” There was nothing trifling about the incident, however. It was the first time in the war that a British warship had struck her colors to an American. Both London and Washington had assumed the entire U. S. Navy would be crushed at the outset of the conflict, but Porter and his comrades were proving otherwise.

  The triumphant Essex now headed home for a refit and to deal with the prisoners she had acquired. Eighty-six were from the Alert, raising the total number on board to a dangerous three hundred. Two days into the trip, in the middle of the night, eleven-year-old Midshipman David Farragut was lying half awake in his hammock—with other reefers, as midshipmen were then called, in the crowded steerage below the main deck—when out of a sleepy eye he glimpsed one of the prisoners standing beside him, gripping a pistol. The man was looking straight ahead into the darkness and not down at the hammock. Farragut froze and closed his eyes. A moment later, he slowly opened them. The man had disappeared. Without making a sound, Farragut rolled out of his hammock. Not seeing any more prisoners, he made his way through the darkened ship, slipped into the captain’s cabin, and awakened Porter, who, grasping the situation immediately, leapt to his feet and rushed on deck, shouting, “FIRE! FIRE!”

  In a flash, the Essex men were out of their hammocks and rushing to their stations, as word was shouted around about the real crisis aboard. Part of Porter’s training was periodically sounding a fire alarm at night. Confused and frightened by the commotion, the prisoners meekly surrendered. Young Farragut was an instant hero.

  The adventurous first cruise of the Essex was not over yet. On the way home to the Delaware River, Porter fell in with three powerful British warships off Georges Bank, northeast of Cape Cod. One was a brig-of-war in chase of an American merchantman. The other two were farther away and much bigger, probably frigates. Porter went after the brig, but the wind was light, and the brig had sweeps (long oars), which allowed her to escape.

  After the Essex displayed American colors, the bigger warships sped after her. “At 4 P.M. they had gained our wake,” Porter reported. He kept on every sail, however, and managed to stay just beyond cannon range until dark, whereupon he hove about and steered straight for the largest pursuer, intending to either sneak past him or “fire a broadside into him and lay him on board.... The crew, in high spirits, . . . gave three cheers when the plan was proposed to them.” At 7:20 Porter hove about and stood southeast by south until 8:30, “when we bore away southwest without seeing anything more of them.”

  Porter was unhappy he had not engaged one of the frigates and puzzled because a pistol aboard the Essex was accidentally fired at the time he calculated she was near the biggest enemy ship. He did make good his escape, however, and sailed for the Delaware River and home.

  WHILE PORTER WAS making the most of his cruise, Commodore Rodgers and his squadron continued to search for the elusive Jamaica convoy. Thick fog plagued Rodgers, however. “At least 6 days out of 7 [were] so . . . obscure,” he wrote, that every vessel farther than four or five miles away was invisible. At times “the fog was so thick... it prevented us seeing each other, even at a cable’s length” (two hundred yards). On June 29 Rodgers spoke an American schooner from Teneriffe. The master said he had passed the convoy two days before, one hundred and fifty miles to the northeast. Rodgers set all sail in that direction, and on July 1 he saw garbage strewn over the water, “quantities of cocoa nut shells, orange peels &c &c,” indicating “the convoy was not too far distant, and we pursued it with zeal.”

  During the next three days Rodgers captured two enemy ships, the brigs Tionella and the Dutchess of Portland, and burned them, but the convoy was nowhere in sight. On July 9, he captured the 10-gun privateer, Dolphin, north of the Azores, and sent her into Philadelphia under a prize master. On the same day, the Hornet captured a British privateer in latitude 45° 30’ north, and longitude 23° west. Her master reported seeing the convoy the evening before. Rodgers continued the chase, sailing east toward the English Channel. On July 13 his squadron was a day’s sail from the chops of the Channel when he abruptly changed course and stood south toward Madeira. He had decided to cut short the cruise and head back to Boston. Scurvy had broken out aboard the United States and the Congress. They had a troubling number of cases—perhaps as many as eighty—between them. No scurvy appeared aboard the President, however.

  Rodgers was off Madeira on the twenty-first, and on the twenty-fourth, northwest of the Canaries, he captured the 16-gun letter of marque John, which he sent to the United States as a prize. He sailed next to the Azores, and from there to Newfoundland’s Grand Banks and then to Cape Sable, before setting a course for Boston, sorely disappointed at the lack of action. Returning to New York would have been too risky; Boston was much less likely to be blockaded. On the way, Rodgers captured four more vessels. For the entire voyage, however, he took only nine stray British merchantmen and privateers, and recaptured an American vessel—little enough, given his efforts and the high hopes he had originally entertained for the squadron.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Constitution and the Guerriere

  AFTER HE OUTRACED Commodore Broke and shaped a course for Boston, Captain Hull worried that Broke might have split up his squadron and ordered some of his ships to blockade the port. Actually, after leaving the Constitution , Broke had gone after Rodgers with his entire squadron, trying to intercept him before he reached the Jamaica convoy. In doing so, Broke left American ports open for dozens of returning merchantmen, which is precisely what Rodgers had hoped he would do.

  What was happening to Rodgers was not on Hull’s mind, however. As he made his way to Boston, he was far more concerned with Secretary Hamilton. Hull expected to receive new orders, and he feared the cautious secretary might direct him to remain in port. Hull hoped to be in and out of Boston in three days, before any new orders arrived. On the way to Boston, however, Hull spoke to the Diana, a merchant vessel boun
d for Baltimore, and he gave her captain a message for Secretary Hamilton requesting new orders. Proceeding without them could cause Hull considerable trouble. He wanted to at least appear ready to receive them.

  The Constitution reached Boston on July 26. No British cruisers were around, but a large number of vessels from Europe and the West Indies were working their way in and out of the busy port. Uncooperative winds forced Hull to tow the Constitution into port. The town was not expecting her. Reports from New York newspapers claimed that Broke had taken her prisoner. But there she was, and Boston, her home port, was ecstatic. Even though Boston’s Federalists hated Madison and his war, and were excoriating the president in their newspapers, they gave Hull a hero’s welcome.

  As soon as he got the chance, Hull sent a letter to Hamilton, telling him that if new orders did not arrive, he planned to sail eastward and join Rodgers’s squadron, although it’s hard to believe he didn’t prefer being on his own. He immediately began replenishing the Constitution, particularly the water he had pumped overboard. When he left Chesapeake Bay two weeks before, he expected to be sailing to New York and had taken on board only eight weeks’ worth of supplies. He had already consumed over a third of them. While he worked, the dreaded new orders from Hamilton were on the way, directing him to turn over command of the Constitution to his senior, Captain William Bainbridge, and return to Washington, where he was to take command of the smaller frigate Constellation . A bit later, after Hamilton found out about Hull’s inspiring escape from Broke, he changed these instructions and directed Hull to “remain at Boston until further orders”—just what Hull did not want to hear. Hamilton and the president still had no confidence in the fleet and no plan for it, other than confining it to port.