Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  PORTER’S DESTINATION was Valparaíso, his intent another one of those tests of honor that had already cost the American navy far too much. Since September, Porter had known that the British squadron under the command of Captain James Hillyar was on his trail, and Porter was determined to “bring them to action if I could meet them on nearly equal terms,” as he would later explain in his official report to Secretary Jones. “I had done all the injury that could be done the British commerce in the Pacific, and still hoped to signalize my cruize by something more splendid before leaving that sea.” Believing that Hillyar “would seek me at Valparaiso as the most likely place to find me,” that was where he accordingly would go.25

  The Essex arrived there on February 3, 1814, and a few nights later Porter gave a ball for the citizens of the town aboard the ship. Early the next morning the Essex Junior signaled from the end of the harbor that two enemy vessels were in sight. At eight o’clock the British warships Phoebe and Cherub sailed into the harbor and began at once what would prove to be a two-month-long test of nerves as each captain tried the limits of the other’s willingness to respect the neutrality of the port. The Phoebe made straight for the Essex and luffed up on her starboard bow, coming within ten or fifteen feet. The two captains knew each other from the Mediterranean: Porter had been a frequent guest of Hillyar and his family at Gibraltar.

  “Captain Hillyar’s compliments to Captain Porter, and hopes he is well,” the English captain called from the quarterdeck.

  “Very well, I thank you,” Porter answered, “but I hope you will not come too near, for fear some accident might take place which would be disagreeable to you.”

  The Essex had been at quarters for some time, the deck crowded with boarders armed with cutlasses and a pair of pistols apiece, the gun crews at their stations with the smoke wafting from their slow matches, and at one gun an American—who Farragut said was still recovering from the revelries of the night before—thought he saw his opposing number on the English ship smirking at him through the gunport. “I’ll stop your making faces,” the American muttered, and he was just about to touch off his gun when the lieutenant caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and knocked him to the deck. “Had that gun been fired, I am convinced that the Phoebe would have been ours,” Farragut would later write.

  Above decks the conversation between the captains had quickly dropped the pretense of politeness. Hillyar innocently declared that if his ship did fall on board of Porter’s it would only be by accident.

  “You have no business where you are,” Porter called back. “If you touch a rope-yarn of this ship, I shall board instantly.”

  For a few incredibly tense moments the standoff continued. Porter too clearly had his later regrets that he did not seize the opportunity then and there, especially as Hillyar’s near approach was such a flagrantly hostile move that it could have offered the justification of self-defense for an attack by the Essex. “The temptation was great,” Porter wrote, but Hillyar raised both his hands, apologized profusely, and said he had had no intention of running his jibboom across the Essex’s forecastle. The Phoebe drifted on past, anchoring a half mile away.26

  Over the following days the officers and crews of both ships frequently saw one another ashore and even paid some friendly calls. Porter kept trying to goad Hillyar into challenging him to a one-on-one fight between the two frigates, but Hillyar replied that he was not prepared to send away the Cherub and abandon the advantage of superior force, and he intended to keep the Essex blockaded in the harbor. The Americans launched a campaign of sarcastic provocations; every night the Essex’s men serenaded the British ships with choruses of “Yankee Doodle” adapted with new lyrics of “nautical sarcasms,” and every day a flag flew from the masthead with the motto “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.” The British tried to reply in kind. Porter observed, “The songs from the Cherub were better sung, but those of the Essex were more witty, and more to the point.” The Phoebe’s attempt to answer “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” with its own pithy saying similarly fell flat: “God and Country; British Sailors’ Best Rights; Traitors Offend Both.” A subsequent taunting challenge from the American sailors, again proposing that they send the Cherub away and fight it out ship to ship, was addressed to “their oppressed brother tars, on board the ship whose motto is too tedious to mention.”27

  But time was clearly on the British captain’s side. Porter had received word that the sloop Raccoon, which had been dispatched to attack the American fur-trapping station on the Columbia River in Oregon, would soon arrive in Valparaíso and that three other British frigates were on their way to the Pacific to join the pursuit of him as well. On March 28, 1814, with a strong wind blowing from the south directly out to the sea, the larboard anchor cable on the Essex parted and her starboard anchor dragged free, and Porter decided to make sail at once and try to make good his escape. The Essex raced for the sea and was on the verge of getting to windward of the two British ships, squeezing between them and the westward edge of the harbor’s mouth, when a squall struck and carried away the main topmast, plunging the men aloft into the sea, where they drowned.

  The wind would not let Porter get back to the anchorage, but he sailed across the harbor’s mouth and anchored within a pistol shot of the shore at the eastern edge. The Essex now had only Chilean neutrality to protect her; she was crippled and in a vulnerable position, and Hillyar’s intentions were soon unmistakable. The Phoebe came up under the American ship’s stern, the Cherub off her bow, and a little before 4:00 p.m. opened up a merciless fire, both keeping out of range of the Essex’s carronades. Three times during the fight the Essex’s men managed to get a spring attached to the anchor, a line running from the anchor cable to the capstan so that the ship could be hauled around to get her broadside to bear; each time the line was shot away by enemy fire. At one point Hillyar’s first lieutenant, William Ingram, protested that it was “deliberate murder” to lay off and shoot at an enemy ship “like a target” when she was unable to return fire, but Hillyar brushed him aside and said he had his orders and was determined not to risk anything to chance.28 It was an absolute bloodbath aboard the Essex. The cockpit, steerage, wardroom, and berth deck were overflowing with wounded, and nearly all of the Essex’s guns were out of action. One gun’s crew had been manned three times; each time the entire crew was killed, fifteen men in all. At 6:20 p.m. Porter ordered the colors hauled down.

  David Farragut’s only injury was when a two-hundred-pound sailor ahead of him on the ladder was struck in the face by an eighteen-pound shot and fell on top of him, covering him with blood and gore and knocking him unconscious for a few moments, but leaving him no more than badly bruised. He worked through the night helping the surgeons tend to the rows upon rows of wounded and the next morning was brought aboard the Phoebe and ushered into the steerage. Shortly afterward he was roused from the tears of despair that had finally engulfed him when he saw a passing boy of the Phoebe’s crew with a pig under his arm and recognized it as his own pet pig, Murphy. Farragut demanded it back; the British sailor claimed it as a prize; “we usually respect private property,” Farragut retorted. Some of the British sailors then suggested that the boys wrestle for it. Farragut agreed, quickly trounced his opponent, and emerged with the pig and the “feeling I had in some degree wiped off the disgrace of our capture.” Shortly afterward Farragut was invited to join the two captains for breakfast in Hillyar’s cabin, but his “heart was too full” to eat anything. When Hillyar kindly said to him, “Never mind my little fellow, it will be your turn next perhaps,” Farragut quickly excused himself and left the cabin “to keep from crying in his presence.”29

  Hillyar agreed to let the survivors return to America on parole in the Essex Junior, and provided them a passport allowing them to pass unmolested through the blockading squadrons. On leaving, Porter thanked Hillyar for his consideration but said he would be equally frank in telling the world how Hillyar had attacked him in neutral waters
. Hillyar looked stricken, grasped Porter by the hand, and said, “My dear Porter, you know not the responsibility that hung over me, with respect to your ship. Perhaps my life depended on my taking her.”30

  The Essex Junior set sail April 27. On July 5, approaching Sandy Hook, the ship was boarded by the British razee Saturn. Her captain looked at the passport, said Hillyar “had no right to make such an arrangement,” and ordered the Essex Junior to remain under his lee for the night. Porter replied that in that case the conditions of his parole had been violated; he considered himself a prisoner of war and thus “at liberty to effect my escape if I can.” The next morning he had the whale boat manned and armed and ordered the Essex Junior to keep between the Saturn and the boat as he pulled off for the shore sixty miles away, quickly disappearing into a fog bank. The Essex Junior was finally allowed to proceed to New York with the rest of the crew, and after a subsequent investigation both American and British authorities agreed that the Americans had been discharged from their parole as a result of the British officer’s actions in detaining them.31

  Back at Nuku Hiva, Porter had left his marine lieutenant, John M. Gamble, with the three remaining prize vessels and twenty officers and men with orders to finish preparing the ships for sea. Gamble would have an even longer and more amazing odyssey. The Americans’ situation on the island began to deteriorate almost immediately. Several men deserted, joining up with Robert White, the mutinous sailor Porter had chased off the Essex on his departure. There were six English prisoners as well under Gamble’s charge, and on May 7, Gamble was aboard the Seringapatam when he was suddenly grabbed and thrown to the deck, had his hands and leg tied, and was dragged into the cabin below, where a few minutes later he was joined by his two midshipmen. One of the mutineers accidentally shot Gamble in the ankle with his pistol. Later that night they put the officers into a leaky boat, and the Seringapatam sailed off under English colors.

  Ashore things were clearly going wrong simultaneously. Possibly instigated by the Englishman-gone-native Wilson, and certainly emboldened by the Americans’ sudden weakness, the once friendly Te I’i, whom Porter had praised for never having once stolen a thing from the Americans, had begun plundering the camp. When Gamble sent all his remaining hands to retrieve the items still left on shore, they were attacked by the islanders, and Midshipman William Feltus and three others were massacred. The survivors clambered into the boat and rowed for the Sir Andrew Hammond, where Gamble, still in excruciating pain from his bullet wound, watched in horror as canoes put off from every direction trying to cut off the fleeing boat. Hopping on one foot from gun to gun, he fired at the approaching natives with rounds of canister and grape that had already been loaded and managed to drive off the attack. Meanwhile hundreds of other Te I’i tribesmen were swarming over the American encampment, pulling down the houses. Down to a crew of eight, five of them ill or injured, Gamble ordered the Greenwich set on fire, then cut his cables and, with the jib and spanker sails bent, got the Sir Andrew Hammond under way.

  Without charts and without enough men to work the ship to windward, Gamble reached the Hawaiian Islands three weeks later, took on provisions, and was heading for Valparaíso still hoping to rendezvous with Porter when he was captured by the Cherub. The British captain kept the Americans in tight confinement on board his ship for five months, the whole way to Rio de Janeiro. Gamble arrived home on August 28, 1815, the end of a voyage that had lasted longer than the entire war.32

  ON ASSUMING the North American command, Admiral Cochrane had wasted no time declaring his intention to wage a more uncompromising brand of warfare than his predecessor had pursued. Cochrane had arrived in Bermuda on March 6, 1814, but Warren had brusquely rebuffed Cochrane’s proposal that he take charge at once; perhaps still thinking of the prize money that was due him as long as he retained the position of commander in chief, Warren icily informed his successor that he “must decline entering into any discussion” of an early transfer and would “strictly conform to the Orders of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, as to the delivering over to you the Command of His Majesty’s Ships upon this Station … and therefore am to inform you that I shall not be prepared to place you in the Command thereof until April 1.”33

  So Cochrane bided his time but was clearly chafing to get into the fight. The day after taking charge, he issued a proclamation opening a new front in the reinvigorated campaign he was preparing to launch along the Chesapeake with the return of summer, and the expected arrival of considerable reinforcements in men and ships.

  WHEREAS it has been represented to me, that many Persons now resident in the UNITED STATES, have expressed a desire to withdraw therefrom,…

  This is therefore to Give Notice,

  That all those who may be disposed to emigrate from the UNITED STATES will, with their Families, be received on board of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels of War, or at the Military Posts that may be established, upon or near the Coast of the UNITED STATES, when they will have their choice of either entering into His Majesty’s Sea or Land Forces, or of being sent as FREE Settlers to the British Possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with all due encouragement.34

  The notice nowhere specifically mentioned “slaves,” but it did not need to: everyone knew who it was aimed at. Cochrane had a thousand copies printed up and sent them to Cockburn, who had returned to Lynnhaven Bay a few weeks earlier to begin reconnoitering and prepare a base of operations for the summer campaign. Cochrane optimistically thought he might be getting as many as fifteen thousand troops from France plus several regiments from England and Ireland. In the meantime, Cockburn established a base at Tangier Island, located almost in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, to receive runaway slaves and begin training them for the several companies of “Colonial Marines” he planned to organize. Cochrane also sent him £2,000 for “contingent expenses”: both to buy information and to try to kidnap “Persons of Political Interest” connected to the Republican party, to be held as hostages.

  While awaiting the promised reinforcements, Cockburn began looking for likely targets he could raid with the 1,500 or so men he currently had available. “You are at perfect liberty as soon as you can muster a Sufficient force, to act with the utmost Hostility against the shores of the United States,” Cochrane had instructed him, pointing to American actions as justification for harsh retaliation:

  Their Government authorizes & directs a most destructive War to be carried on against our Commerce & we have no means of retaliating but on shore, where they must be made to feel in their Property, what our Merchants do in having their Ships destroyed at Sea; & taught to know that they are at the mercy of an invading foe.… Their Sea Port Towns laid in Ashes & the Country wasted will be some sort of a retaliation for their savage Conduct in Canada.35

  Cochrane specifically suggested that he choose targets that would best facilitate the exodus of more slaves: “Let the Landings you may make be more for the protection of the desertion of the Black Population than with a view to any other advantage, the force you have is too Small to accomplish an object of magnitude—the great point to be attained is the cordial Support of the Black population with them properly armed & backed with 20,000 British Troops, Mr. Maddison will be hurled from his Throne.”36

  Hundreds of slaves flocked to Tangier through the spring and summer of 1814. Although they had had time to receive only a few weeks’ training in firearms, Cockburn reported they fought extremely well in several small skirmishes. Unlike the regular troops, there was scarcely any worry of them deserting; they knew the country well; and the fear that armed black men had already induced among the Virginia and Maryland militia units had significant shock value in itself: “They expect Blacky will have no mercy on them and they know that he understands bush fighting and the locality of the Woods as well as themselves.” In one well-publicized incident that sent tremors through slaveholders along the Chesapeake, an escaped slave led a British force to his former master’s hom
e, and while the troops looted the plantation, the ex-slave, armed with a pistol and sword, sat up through the night verbally tormenting his former master. At dawn the troops withdrew, taking the rest of the plantation’s slaves with them.

  Cockburn reported after one early raid by his black marines, “They have induced me to alter the bad opinion I had of the whole of their Race & I now really believe these we are training, will neither shew want of Zeal or Courage when employed by us in attacking their old Masters.” In late May 1814 the Colonial Marines had displayed notable courage during an attack on a militia battery at Pungoteague, near Tangier Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore: one of the black soldiers was shot and died instantly, but, Cockburn said, “it did not daunt or check the others in the least but on the contrary animated them to seek revenge.”37

  Cochrane’s plans for revenge were on a grander scale, however. In July 1814 he wrote Lord Melville laying out options for the destruction of one of “the principal Towns of America,” Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Annapolis, Richmond, and Norfolk among them. He issued sterner and sterner public directives to his commanders to “destroy & lay waste such Towns and Districts upon the Coast as you may find assailable.” While doing so, he added, they should “take every opportunity of explaining to the people” that they would have to look to their own government for compensation, since the British actions were merely “retributory justice” for the “wanton & unjustifiable outrages on the unoffending Inhabitants” of Upper Canada. Yet Cochrane vacillated for weeks over where the brunt of the British sword should fall. He still had received no official word on how many troops would arrive or when. Croker had warily distanced himself from any responsibility for the direction of the land campaign, telling Cochrane, “Their Lordships entrust to your judgment the choice of the objects on which you may employ this Force,” and advising only that he not advance too far inland as to risk having his line of retreat cut, and to give preference to “crippling the Enemy’s naval Force” should such an opportunity present itself.38