Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  And in a final, unmistakable slap at Warren’s authority, the secretary informed him that “my Lords have thought fit to appoint a Captain of the Fleet to serve with your Flag”—but without consulting Warren on the choice of the man to fill the post. As their lordships “were not aware of any individual” whom the admiral might prefer, they were naming Captain Henry Hotham to serve under him. Although Hotham was able to relieve Warren of much of the weight of his administrative duties in the coming months, he was also unmistakably the Admiralty’s man, sent to light a fire under the commander in chief while also keeping an eye on him and reporting back directly to the Admiralty in a series of private letters describing the true state of things on the North American command.21

  Still, despite their lordships’ considerable disappointment in Warren’s failure to use the considerable force at his disposal, Croker informed him, “as it is of the highest importance to the Character and interests of our Country that the Naval Force of the Enemy, should be quickly and completely disposed of, my Lords have thought themselves justified at this moment in withdrawing Ships from other important services for the purpose of placing under your orders a force with which you cannot fail to bring the Naval War to a termination, either by the capture of the American National Vessels, or by strictly blockading them in their own Waters.” The additional forces nearly doubled the number of large warships on the American stations, giving Warren a total of ten ships of the line, thirty frigates, and fifty sloops of war.

  On December 29, 1812, Warren had sent another plea for reinforcements, complaining that many of the promised ships had not yet arrived on station, and when that message arrived in London in early February 1813, it triggered an even more withering response from Croker. “Under these circumstances,” the secretary wrote, “their Lordships are not only not prepared to enter into your opinion that the force on your station was not adequate to the duties to be executed, but they feel that … it may not be possible to maintain on the Coast of America for any length of time a force so disproportionate to the Enemy as that which, with a view to enabling you to strike some decisive blow, they have now placed under your orders.” If some of the additional ships had not yet joined Warren’s flag owing to their being detained on convoy duty, that was entirely the admiral’s own fault for failing to do his job of blockading the American coast: “the necessity of sending such heavy Convoys arises from the facility and safety with which the American Navy has hitherto found it possible to put to Sea.”

  Croker’s orders left no doubts about what was now expected. As instructed in a secret order dated November 27, 1812, to be carried out in the event the American government rejected the British proposal for a cessation of hostilities, Warren was to immediately institute a complete blockade of all American ports in the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River. He was to destroy the American navy and as soon as the job was done return some of the extra line-of-battle ships to England.22

  Their lordships had also decided to send the admiral some energetic assistance in the business of waging war. His new second in command, already sailed for Bermuda with a reinforcing squadron, was to be Rear Admiral George Cockburn. Sixteen years earlier, as a twenty-four-year-old frigate captain, Cockburn had distinguished himself by capturing a more heavily armed Spanish ship in an action that had so impressed Nelson he had awarded the young captain a gilt-handled sword he personally ordered made for him.23 Admiral Cockburn’s name was pronounced “Coburn,” but Americans would soon be taking grim, sarcastic pleasure in pronouncing it as written, and with the stress on the second syllable.24

  WARREN WAS in fact neither as hesitant nor as bereft of success in his first few months as Croker implied in his verbal keelhaulings of the admiral, nor were his excuses for his failure to seal off the American coast without some justice. By the end of 1812, the force under Warren’s command had already sent 120 prizes in to Halifax, 50 to Bermuda, 40 to the Leeward Islands, and 30 to Jamaica—some 240 ships in all.25 Besides taking the American navy brig Nautilus at the outbreak of the war, British warships had since captured two other American men-of-war, the eighteen-gun Wasp and the fourteen-gun Vixen.

  Yet defeat seemed to stalk even British victories. The Wasp was taken on October 18, 1812, about 350 miles north of Bermuda by a British seventy-four, the Poictiers, that appeared on the scene only after the American ship had already triumphed two hours earlier in a savage forty-five-minute battle against a slightly more powerful British brig, the Frolic; in an action fought in a heavy sea, the Americans’ deadly accurate gunnery left only 20 of the Frolic’s 110-man crew unharmed.

  The Vixen was also taken by a vastly superior British warship, the thirty-two-gun frigate Southampton; the American brig was captured on November 22 in the West Indies, but five days later, as the frigate and her prize were making their way through the Crooked Island passage bound for Jamaica, both struck an uncharted reef in the night. Daylight found the Vixen a total loss, her bows penetrated by a rock and her bilge filled, the Southampton impossibly wedged between the rocks and a leak sprung. “Lives were the only possible things that could be saved,” wrote one of the Vixen’s men in an anonymous published account that described the harrowing shipwreck, the rescue of the two ships’ crews on Conception Island, and the Americans’ subsequent tormenting imprisonment packed belowdecks in sweltering and airless prison hulks on Jamaica.26

  Capping the ill-omened mischances that seemed to plague the British command that first year of the war were a series of disasters, natural and unnatural, that struck in December. The brig Plumper hit the ledges off Dipper Harbor, New Brunswick, sinking instantly and taking fifty men and £70,000 in specie down with her. And in a simply bizarre incident that same month on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, a British captain went berserk, challenged town officials to a duel, and engaged in a three-day standoff with the local authorities and soldiers of the British army garrison, at one point ordering his marines to open fire on the townspeople, before he was finally subdued and arrested.27

  And though the Royal Navy was the world’s unquestioned master of the naval blockade, it was never so simple or straightforward a tactic as Croker implied in his impatient letters to Warren demanding results. That was especially so when it came to trying to seal off a coastline as long as America’s, and so punctuated by a myriad of creeks, bays, inlets, and rivers.

  The blockade was a natural recourse for a superior naval power, a way to replace the chance and fortunes of war with the methodical application of overwhelming force to strangle an enemy, and two crucial innovations of the previous two decades had made it possible for British ships to stay on station for the months at a time that blockade duty required. One was the Royal Navy’s belated recognition, in 1795, of British scientific discoveries made a half century earlier regarding the cause and prevention of scurvy. As late as the 1780s a single six-week cruise of the Channel Fleet resulted in 2,400 cases of scurvy among the crews, and at one point in that decade nearly a quarter of the entire 100,000-man force of the Royal Navy was on the sick list from the disease. The subsequent addition of lime juice and fresh fruit to the shipboard diet alone greatly extended the time that British warships could remain at sea. The other almost simultaneous innovation was the use of copper cladding to protect the wooden hulls of warships. In warm waters, boring worms could do enough damage to an unprotected hull in just a few years to require a ship to be taken out of service for a nearly complete rebuild. In all waters, seaweed, barnacles, and other crustaceans accumulated so fast that in as little as six weeks the speed of an unclad ship was noticeably reduced, and in as little as six more weeks the ship might have to be careened, scraped, and recaulked to remain seaworthy at all. By taming the ravages of scurvy and weed, a ship could stay at sea for as much as four to six months, if resupplied with water and provisions, before accumulated wear finally required putting into port for a refit.

  Still, blockade duty was a voracious consumer of ships and men. To be recognized and enforceable b
y admiralty law, a blockade had to be maintained continuously and with sufficient force to be effective. A blockade was a complete interdiction of all seagoing traffic in or out of an enemy port, neutral vessels included; and a blockading force had to match its words with actions, otherwise every belligerent could simply proclaim a blockade as a pretext for seizing any neutral vessels it happened upon in the vicinity of an enemy’s coast. Maintaining a blockade on a port was debilitating, boring, but exacting work: the blockading squadrons sailing back and forth, tacking again and again across the same stretch of water day after day, the danger of a lee shore constantly looming and the chance for glory or even a respite from the tedium nil.28

  And even with the ships’ extended sea time, probably a third of the blockading fleet at any given moment would be undergoing repairs or traveling to or from the yard. Warren looked at the previous British experience blockading the American coast, during the Revolution, and found that in 1775 his predecessor had calculated he needed fifty ships for the job. But even that did not take into account the need to rotate ships on and off station; factoring that in increased the number to around ninety—in other words, virtually the entire nominal force under Warren’s command. When Warren attempted to point this out, it predictably earned him another stinging rebuke from Croker, who replied that the comparison was “by no means just; you will recollect that at the former period the fleets of France were actually in the West Indies and American waters, and it was chiefly to oppose them that so great a force was necessary.”29

  But the Admiralty itself kept up a barrage of maddeningly contradictory instructions to Warren that kept tying up his ships for other duties—or potential duties. Both Warren and his masters in the Admiralty had a long list of contingencies they constantly worried about, chief among them the nightmare scenario that the French navy would indeed take advantage of the moment to strike a blow at the otherwise preoccupied British naval force on the North American station. The Royal Navy’s blockade of France, involving hundreds of ships constantly patrolling the coast and adjacent waters of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, had managed to keep Napoleon’s naval power almost completely at bay in the years since the defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805; French warships all but abandoned any further attempts to put to sea, and Napoleon began reassigning thousands of sailors to infantry duty as the decisive struggle between France and her enemies shifted to a series of climactic land campaigns, on the Peninsula, the Continent, and Russia. By the start of the war with America, the Royal Navy had seized all of France’s colonies and secured unchallenged control of the sea lanes needed to ferry troops and supplies for Wellington’s campaign on the Peninsula.30 Though the French navy never did succeed in breaking out and joining the battle in American waters, its mere existence was a danger that could not be ignored; sheltered within fortified ports, the French fleet was an ever-present threat that might take advantage of bad weather or good luck to allow a powerful squadron to slip out and fall on the back of Warren’s force.

  Meanwhile, the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville, was privately cautioning Warren against withdrawing any of his ships from the Caribbean stations for offensive operations against America, given the political clout of the West Indian merchants and the “clamour” that they had created in London over fears that their merchant vessels might be left unprotected against the ravages of American privateers. Though these fears were “apparently unfounded,” Melville conceded, it would be best not to upset such a powerful constituency. In frustration, Warren replied that since the addition of the West Indies stations to his command had only increased his administrative burdens without augmenting his useful force, the Jamaica and Leeward Islands commanders ought to be placed under his direct orders only if the French appeared. This earned him still another barbed reply from Croker. “If you should find that you are unequal to the management of so extensive a duty,” the secretary sniffed, then their lordships would prefer to have three distinct and fully responsible commanders in chief under them, rather than the “divided authority and mixed responsibility” that Warren proposed.31

  But Warren got the message. In early February 1813 he arrived at Lynnhaven Bay aboard his flagship San Domingo, issued a formal declaration of blockade of all ports and harbors on the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River, and, leaving five frigates, returned to Bermuda and immediately dispatched Cockburn, who had arrived there in mid-January aboard the seventy-four Marlborough, with a huge additional force to the Chesapeake. Along with the ships already in place at Lynnhaven Bay and the Marlborough, Cockburn had at his command three other seventy-fours (Poictiers, Victorious, and Dragon), two additional frigates, a sloop of war, and a schooner.32

  A few weeks later Warren issued a new standing order to all his captains conveying their lordships’ admonition to increase gunnery practice, even if it meant forsaking some of the painting, shining, scrubbing, and polishing that was so ingrained in the traditions of the service. “Upon … the expert management of the Guns the preservation of the high character of the British Navy most essentially depends.” Those endless spit-and-polish tasks “on which it is not unusual to employ the Men are of very trifling importance, when Compared with a due preparation (by instruction and practice) for the effectual Services of the day of Battle.” Blockade duty was notorious for magnifying the obsession with appearance, with the ships constantly under the bored and disapproving eye of the admiral; even running out the guns in dumb show tended to mess their polish, and so gun drill was often abandoned altogether during the months ships spent at sea blockading an enemy coast. But scouring iron stanchions and ring bolts was now to be gradually phased out, the Admiralty reiterated in a subsequent circular message to the admirals, and “the time thrown away on this unnecessary practice be applied to the really useful and important points of discipline and exercise at Arms.”

  Warren concluded: “The issue of the Battle will greatly depend on the cool, steady and regular manner in which the Guns shall be loaded, pointed & fired.”33 Tradition was one thing, winning wars another. The Americans had already changed the traditional rules of what it took to win.

  IN JANUARY 1813 the headquarters of the United States Department of the Navy consisted of three not very large rooms in a two-and-a-half-story brick building located about two hundred yards west of the White House, which it shared with the State and War departments. The four clerks were crowded into one room on the second floor, the secretary of the navy had another, downstairs the nine men of the navy accounts department filled the third, and everywhere hung an air of disorganized neglect. Secretary Hamilton’s successor arrived in Washington at three o’clock in the afternoon on January 23, and the friends he ran into that very first day, he wrote his wife that evening, mainly “commiserate me on the Herculean task I have to encounter.”34

  The new man was William Jones of Philadelphia, whose Republican credentials, knowledge of ships and the sea, and experience in running an efficient and businesslike operation were matched only by his extraordinary reluctance to face the ordeal of public office. He had been one of the four men to turn down Jefferson’s offer of the navy post in 1801, and had turned down two approaches by Madison for positions since, one to be consul in Denmark, the other to take on the job of commissary general of the army, a post newly created in the spring of 1812. Jones had considered taking the latter position until he read the statute governing it and realized it would be an unremitting nightmare, a figurehead fully responsible for the purchase of military supplies for the entire army but without any real authority to keep the process honest.35

  On December 28, 1812, Pennsylvania congressman Jonathan Roberts wrote Jones to advise him that Hamilton was about to be dismissed and that Jones was Madison’s first choice to replace him. “The vacancy about to occur has not been effected thro a hope of getting your services but from the impossibility of proceeding with Mr. Hamilton,” Roberts wrote. Nonetheless, he begged Jones not to say no this time. “The Nation and the Navy po
int to you as the fittest man we have & what is to become of us if the fittest man will not come forward in a moment of public danger.”

  Besides having run a shipping business for decades, served as a member of Congress from 1801 to 1803, and sailed around the world from 1805 to 1807, Jones had seen the face of war firsthand. As a fifteen-year-old volunteer during the Revolution he had fought at the battles of Trenton and Princeton; later in the war he had served under Thomas Truxtun aboard an American privateer, then joined the Continental navy and been wounded and taken prisoner. In 1795, while living in Charleston where his merchant shipping business had taken him, he was elected captain of a local militia unit, the Charleston Republican Artillery Company, and during that time he wrote a manual for artillery drill.36 In January 1813 he was fifty-one, had the substantial air of a prosperous merchant of the previous century, and was happily married to a wife to whom he wrote long, affectionate letters notable not only for their kindness but for the way he addressed her as a complete equal in business and political matters. He and Eleanor were childless but he was the guardian of Eleanor’s nephew, whose father had died impoverished, and they had a comfortable and extensive social life among friends and family in Philadelphia.