Perilous Fight
Page 41
But the continuing British influx of men and ships to the lakes, Ontario especially, had a more ominous strategic consequence: to “tempt us to follow his example and thus free him from trouble on the ocean and expose our Atlantic frontier to his depredations,” Jones warned. The British strength at Kingston meant that they could choose the “time circumstances and force,” always controlling the all-important military factor of initiative in the war on that front. “Not so on the ocean where twenty of his ships cannot check the depredations of one of our ships.”8
On the ocean, though, the American navy’s presence was down to the sloops of war that Jones had championed a year before. The Constitution was bottled up in Boston after barely escaping capture by the British frigates Junon and Tenedos in a mad dash into Marblehead in April, during which the ship had thrown tons of water and supplies overboard. She had subsequently slipped into Salem and then down to the navy yard at Charlestown, but there were now at least two British seventy-fours and four frigates in Boston Bay, and until the winter storms once again returned to blow them off station and provide a welcome cover of fog and snow, the Constitution’s chances of getting to sea were nil. At Portsmouth the Congress was now in ordinary, her crew dispatched to Lake Ontario; the President was still trapped in New York, the United States and the Macedonian in New London, the Constellation in Norfolk.
More frustrating, there was now the certainty that none of the new American ships being built at Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington—including three of the six new sloops of war, all three of the new frigates, and one of the three seventy-fours—was ever going to make it past the tight British blockade of the Chesapeake and Delaware. The seventy-fours at Portsmouth and Boston were at least further along than their stranded sister ship in Philadelphia, despite continued tinkering with their plans by Hull and Bainbridge and continual sparring by the two commodores over sharing the limited supplies of live oak stockpiled at their two yards. At Jones’s orders Hull had kept sending requests to Bainbridge—“For God’s sake give me all the timber you can, especially futtocks”—and received only grudging replies. Hull visited in person in March 1814, eliciting a barbed observation from Bainbridge in a letter to Rodgers: “Hull is as fat and good natured as ever.”9
On June 18, in a ceremony meant to coincide with the second anniversary of the declaration of the war, the Independence, America’s first ship of the line, slid eighty feet down her ways at Charlestown Navy Yard, then stuck and came to a halt. Bainbridge blamed the humid weather and the failure of the tallow that had been applied to the ways to adhere to the unseasoned wood; the next day a master joiner working to free the ship was struck and killed by a falling block. After several more days’ unsuccessful struggle, Bainbridge ordered boiling tallow and oil poured on the ways; and on June 22, before a crowd of twenty thousand, the ship splashed into the harbor. The fiasco gave critics of the war a great field to exercise their wit. Federalist newspapers widely reprinted the quip attributed to a gentleman in Philadelphia when he heard the news: “It was no wonder she stuck.… The war itself sticks; the recruiting sticks; the loan sticks; in short everything connected with the transaction of that illfated day sticks; and no wonder the 74 sticks.”10
But three of the new sloops of war had gotten to sea that spring of 1814. The Frolic, sailing from Boston in February, was captured after a thirteen-hour chase by a British frigate and schooner in which she threw everything including her guns overboard and almost made it; but the Peacock, which had slipped out of New York on March 12, more than made up for her fate by taking the British brig Epervier in a sharp action off Cape Canaveral on April 28, at a cost of two slight casualties to the British ship’s twenty-three, including nine dead. The victory netted $200,000 in specie the Epervier was carrying; the prize was manned and successfully brought into Savannah, the Peacock daringly decoying away two British frigates that tried to intercept them and then outsailing the larger enemy ships and making it safely to port two days after her prize. On May 1 the newly completed Wasp, built at a private shipyard in Newburyport, put out of Portsmouth on a commerce-raiding foray to the British isles; on June 4 the Peacock, ready for sea again, headed forth on the same orders. “Our new Sloops of war are a fair class of Vessels and sail to admiration,” Jones wrote Madison, determined to use his new weapons to their utmost effect.11
Jones’s strategic logic notwithstanding, the cabinet meeting in Washington on June 7 approved four ambitious plans to press on with the land war on the Canadian front: an expedition to Lake Huron in the far west, a landing on the north side of Lake Erie and a thrust toward York, a movement north of Kingston to secure the St. Lawrence River, and an advance toward Montreal to cut off Kingston from Quebec.
Three weeks later, Secretary of State Monroe sent the American peace commissioners a secret instruction that spoke more truly of Madison’s as-yet-undeclared, but unmistakable, decision to end the war: “On mature consideration, it has been decided,… you may omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment, if found indispensably necessary.”12
NEARING DUSK on the evening of July 6, 1814, a small boat came tossing through the rough surf near the town of Babylon on the south side of Long Island, and when with some difficulty it reached shore, a man in the uniform of a navy captain scrambled onto the beach. He was promptly taken prisoner by the local militia, and the story he told sounded so incredible that at first it seemed only to confirm the militia officers’ suspicions that they had captured a British officer on a secret mission. Only when their prisoner produced his U.S. naval commission identifying himself as Captain David Porter did they believe he was who he claimed to be. They gave him three cheers, fired a twenty-one-gun salute from a small swivel gun, and provided him a horse and carriage to take him to New York and an oxcart to haul the boat and his six-man crew, and the news of Porter’s return spread like lightning.13
His story was indeed incredible, and the tumultuous welcome he and the 125 other surviving men of the Essex received upon their arrival in New York two days later was probably more a tribute to their seemingly miraculous reappearance after nearly two years at sea than to any laurels of victory they could claim. When Porter crossed the ferry from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Manhattan, a cheering crowd unhitched the horses from his cab as soon as he stepped in and over his protests pulled him up and down the streets of the city to roaring cheers. “The return of this distinguished naval officer,” the New York Columbian opined, “… has created in the hearts of his fellow citizens a kind of melancholy joy scarcely ever equaled on any similar occasion.”14
The melancholy came from the immediate news that Porter brought with him: the Essex had been taken in a murderous battle in Valparaíso harbor on March 28, 1814, leaving 60 percent of her 255 men casualties, including 89 dead. The American frigate had received some fifty broadsides during the two-and-a-half-hour fight; her carpenter reported counting two hundred 18-pound shot lodged in her hull.15
But their entire odyssey since leaving New York at the very start of the war had been nothing short of Homeric, and their very survival seemed, as the Columbian’s editorial writer put it, testimony to the “incomparable zeal” of the American sailor, even in defeat. The full story would be told by Porter in his published memoir the following year, but many of the details were in the newspapers in days, both from information Porter provided the editors and from his lengthy report to Secretary Jones, which was immediately made public.
On leaving the Galápagos the previous fall, the Essex and her prizes had made an easy three weeks’ sail due west, and on the morning of October 25, 1813, the flotilla stood into Taiohae Bay on the Marquesas island of Nuku Hiva. The water was crystalline and smooth, and as they opened the bay a long ribbon of white beach stretched before their eyes. Behind it several neat villages clustered amid the trees in the valleys between the mountains.
The wind seemed unfavorable for reaching moorings close to shore, so Porter anchored four miles away, just inside the mouth of th
e harbor, and shortly afterward a boat put out from the beach and headed their way. As it neared, Porter was astonished to see it that carried three white men, one of whom had clearly gone native, as he was dressed in nothing but a loincloth and his bared body was covered in ornate tattoos in the style of the local Polynesian tribes. He turned out to be an Englishman named Wilson who had arrived on the island under mysterious circumstances several years earlier and, having acquired the language, was able to interpret for Porter. The other two were Americans from a merchant ship that had left six of her crewmen on the island to collect a cargo of valuable sandalwood while the ship proceeded to Canton, but their ship had not returned and four of the men had since died; one of the two survivors was a navy midshipman on furlough, John M. Maury, who promptly requested to enter into service under Porter.
All along the hilltops they could see clusters of men, and Porter learned that the Ha’apa’a, a neighboring tribe that occupied the mountains, had been staging raids against the villages of the valley Te I’i tribe for several weeks, destroying their houses and killing their breadfruit trees. Porter ordered four boats armed and manned and went to shore at once to make a show of both force and friendship to the Te I’i. He passed out fishhooks and old iron barrel hoops, had the marines put on a demonstration of musketry, and made a short speech promising to be “as brethren” to the people of the valley and protect them against the mountain tribe.16
“When I wished to assemble my officers and men to return on board,” Porter recounted, “I perceived they had formed with the female part of the community, an intimacy much closer than that which brotherly relationship gave them a title to; they had soon made themselves understood without any aid of interpreters; and had wandered to the houses or perhaps the bushes, which suited their purpose as well, to ratify their treaty, the negotiating of which neither cost them much time or trouble.”17
Word spread instantly through the ship that the girls were as lovely and accommodating as the most vivid tales they had been spinning for weeks had imagined them to be, and the crew immediately volunteered to warp the ship in to her moorings rather than stand back out to sea and wait for more favorable wind to sail in, as Porter thought advisable. When the ship was brought in, the shore was completely lined with females waving in invitation, the sailors agog at the bare breasts and slender waists exposed by the girls’ white robes slung and knotted over their shoulders. Porter found it impossible to hold out against the “many applications” to go ashore, and soon it was a “perfect Bedlam,” with the girls and women coming back to the ship and staying through the whole night until put back ashore the following morning, “with whatever was given them by all such as had shared their favours.”18
Porter was disarmingly frank about the sexual mores of the islanders and the predictable reaction of his crew, at sea for over a year—at least when he wrote the first edition of his published journal.
Far from seeming to consider it an offence against modesty, they seemed to view it only as an accommodation to strangers who had claims on their hospitality. They attached no shame to a proceeding which they not only considered as natural, but as an innocent and harmless amusement, by which no one was injured.… With the common sailors and their girls, all was helter skelter, and promiscuous intercourse, every girl the wife of every man in the mess, and frequently of every man in the ship; each one from time to time took such as suited his fancy.19
Porter suggested that some of the officers formed more serious attachments but was circumspect about his own activities, only saying, “The women were inviting in their appearance, and practiced all the bewitching language of the eyes and features, which is so universally understood; and if an allowance can be made for a departure from prudential measures, it is when a handsome and sprightly girl of sixteen, whose almost every charm exposed to view, invites to follow her.”20
Within a few days the Americans had established a small village on a plain behind the beach, overlooking the valleys, with a cooperage to build new water casks, a rope walk to spin new rigging, and an oven made from a load of bricks found aboard one of the prizes baking fresh bread for all the men every day. The Essex was careened down on the beach, and the local men were employed scraping the barnacles off her bottom with half coconut shells. Work went to four o’clock each afternoon, and then a quarter of the men were allowed to stay each night ashore. David Farragut recalled that he and the other youngsters were placed under the close supervision of the ship’s chaplain but were allowed to wander about during the day on the island with the native boys their age, learning to swim, throw a spear, and walk on stilts. One day four thousand men from all the nearby villages appeared, and by nightfall they had constructed houses to replace all of the Americans’ tents; there were dwellings for the officers, a cooper’s shop, a sail loft, a sick bay, a guardhouse.21
The entire population of Nuku Hiva was about forty thousand, divided among three dozen often warring tribes. Porter had sent the Ha’apa’a a message offering friendship and offering to buy their hogs and fruit, but warning he would “send a body of men to chastise them” if they did not cease their raids on the valley. That had elicited only a derisive response that the Americans were clearly afraid to fight, since all they did was make threats. Lieutenant Downes then led a detachment of forty sailors and marines from the Essex Junior followed by a large body of the Te I’i up the mountain. There they were met by four thousand Ha’apa’a warriors, who launched a volley of stones and spears, then a barrage of contemptuous scoffs, and then “exposed their posteriors to them.” Realizing that their entire position on the island was now in the balance, Downes called on his men to charge; with three cheers they stormed the wooden fortress at the top of a hill where the enemy warriors had retreated, and rushing through another volley of spears and stones, they shot dead five of the natives at point-blank range. At that the battle was over.22
Almost immediately the Americans were plunged into an even larger war with the most aggressive tribe on the island, the Taipi, who were even more contemptuous of Porter’s offers of peaceful trade and told him if he was so powerful he would obviously just come and take their hogs; the fact that he did not obviously proved that he was unable to. This time Porter himself led a small expedition and was ambushed in an attack that he was lucky to escape from with his life; Downes’s leg was shattered by a stone, and the men beat a hasty retreat. “Perfectly sick of bush fighting,” Porter again tried to get the Taipi to back down by pointing out the superiority of his force and weapons, but the Taipi sent word back that they were unimpressed by the Americans’ muskets, which “frequently missed fire, rarely killed, and the wounds they occasioned were not as painful as those of a spear or stone.” Only after Porter led two hundred men on a three-day expedition into the Taipi strongholds did the tribe at last sue for peace, and Porter told them because of the trouble they had caused him they would have to pay four hundred hogs as an indemnity. They agreed.23
By December 9, 1813, the repairs of the Essex were complete and a full stock of wood and water was aboard, the decks crowded with hogs and heaps of bananas and dried coconuts. Porter had ordered the crew to remain aboard the last few days preparing the ship for sea, and the men were predictably “restless, discontented, and unhappy.”
One of the Essex’s men, while visiting the Essex Junior on a Sunday, boasted that they were going to refuse to weigh anchor when the order was given. “I was willing to let them ease their minds by a little grumbling,” Porter recalled, “… but a threat of this kind was carrying matters rather too far.” The next morning he mustered all the men and strode onto the deck, his cutlass in his hand, which he laid on the capstan and, as David Farragut recalled, “shaking with anger, addressed the crew.”
“All of you who are in favor of weighing the anchor when I give the order, pass over to the starboard side.”
To a man they all did, including the sailor Porter knew had been shooting his mouth off on the Essex Junior, a man named Robert
White. Porter walked right up to him and demanded what he was doing on the starboard side. The man, trembling, tried to deny he had ever uttered any insubordinate words, causing Porter to reply, “You lie, you scoundrel!” and told him he had better run for his life. White leapt over the starboard gangway, was picked up by a passing canoe, and made for shore. Porter then turned back to the assembled men and told them that before he would ever let a mutiny succeed on his ship he would put a match to the magazine “and blow us all to hell.” With that he gave the order to weigh, and as the fiddle struck up “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the anchor “fairly flew to the bows,” Farragut recalled, and the Essex and the Essex Junior made sail and put out to sea.24