Mad for Glory

by Robert Booth

  Sick or well, the men of the Essex poured out their hearts in farewell letters to loved ones. The letters were put in a sack belonging to the shore-bound pilot, who delivered them, in secret, to Porter. He opened them all to see if somehow his men had “become possessed of a knowledge of our destination.” Although the answer was no, he had all of the letters destroyed.

  They sailed on a fresh north wind with all flags flying and the great vessel riding extremely low in the water. Crowds formed along the river and on the sand hills of Cape Henlopen as the 850-ton frigate made her majestic way toward the horizon. The Essex was a splendid, enormous machine, unlike anything found on land: stem to stern, top to bottom, she was a symphony of moving parts and wind-powered complexity, requiring the best efforts of about 250 seamen (not counting the marines and other specialists in her crew manifest) to make her go. At 141 feet along the gun deck, she was about as long as a large merchant ship, but she was built on an entirely different scale of strength and amplitude, with massive timbers and thick planks that gave her hull a fortress-like character. She seemed immense as she passed by the cheering onlookers under full sail at nine knots or more; on three towering masts and her extended bowsprit, she carried sixteen major sails and more than a mile of heavy cordage in her rigging. As impressive as she was, the Essex measured just thirty-seven feet in beam across the spar deck and was the smallest frigate in the American fleet—the Constitution was double her tonnage. She had other virtues, though, including speed and stoutness, that would make her as seaworthy as any warship afloat; and on her maiden voyage in 1800 under Captain Edward Preble she had been the first U.S. Navy vessel to cross the Indian Ocean.

  Within twenty-four hours of clearing the Delaware, the mighty Essex was fighting for her life off the shoals of Chincoteague in a roaring gale. Staggering seaward, she plunged and rolled in thirty-foot ocean swells, shipping enormous quantities of water. Porter did not need to butt heads with a hurricane. He could have jibed around and run before the wind back to the safety of the river, but retreat was unthinkable to David Porter. Risking everything, he drove his men and ship into the storm, and succeeded in forcing the Essex past the danger of the coast and out to the open sea.

  When the storm blew by, Porter assembled his soaked, shaken, seasick crew and gave them a speech. He thanked them for their good service and refrained, as usual, from any mention of God’s providence in the matter. Porter was neither sentimental nor religious. Next, he excoriated them for their drunken, slovenly behavior while waiting in the Delaware. He assured them that they deserved severe punishment; however, in view of their now-spoiled provisions and soaked bedding and clothes, he granted a general pardon and promised a cruise full of adventure and rewards for all who did their duty, and three dozen lashes for those who did not. He acknowledged that their rations would be limited, but consoled them with the prospect of a full daily share of first-rate rum. Porter then set forth the rules for cleanliness and health, starting with ship-wide fumigation by pouring vinegar on red-hot cannonballs first thing every morning.

  The navy had no standing orders as to sanitation, and some captains gave it no heed. Not Porter, who had once spent nineteen months in prison and had seen the miseries of the typical sleeping quarters, or berth deck, a permanently dark space less than six feet high where 300 men in their hammocks would foul the air with their breathing as they struggled to sleep. By contrast, Porter had hammocks slung on the gun deck as well as the berth deck, which gave the men more space and cleaner air and allowed the gun crews to sleep near their long friends, just in case—the gunports were kept open to the breeze, and the men got a good night’s sleep and awoke refreshed. Porter was different, too, in having an officer command the berth deck and attend to health and cleanliness, and he was unique in allowing his men, starting at four o’clock every afternoon, to enjoy two hours of leisure during which the whole ship was “a scene of noisy merriment.”

  Following a southeasterly track, the Essex sailed for Africa flying an English flag; in waters devoid of Americans, there was no need to call attention to a U.S. naval presence among the trading vessels of various nations. Like Americans themselves, American naval vessels looked like their English counterparts, and their officers had no trouble working up an English accent.

  One morning about three weeks into the cruise, they spied a vessel on the horizon, but she proved to be a Portuguese merchant brig, and they let her pass. Portugal was allied with Britain against the French but was not an enemy of the United States. In fact, the Portuguese solicited American trade in Continental ports, island colonies, and in the huge, rich Portuguese territory of Brazil. In spite of internal divisions, shaky finances, an overextended military, and relocation of the royal court to Rio de Janeiro, Portugal remained an imperial power in the world.

  Soon after spotting the Portuguese brig, the Essex gave chase once again, in heavy winds, and this time the men were thrilled to see a distant battleship. To the beat of drums they ran to their stations and jumped into the rigging to reef the topsails and prepare for action, but they were hit by a squall. When it cleared, “the chase” was under press of sail, escaping into the darkness. Porter decided that she had been the U.S. sloop of war Wasp, which had sailed from the Delaware a few days before the Essex.

  One day, while rolling along in mid-ocean, the Essex came to a stop as Cowell ordered her foresails backed, and the masthead lookout cried, “Sail-o!”

  “Where away?” called Lieutenant Downes, “and what does she look like?”

  “’Tis Neptune’s own boat!” came the answer from aloft. “The god of the seas! He wishes permission to come aboard with his train!”

  The midshipmen looked on in astonishment as the king of the sea made his appearance. William Feltus, a young New Yorker, watched Neptune and his wife Amphitrite roll across the quarter deck in the divine car—two chairs on an old gun carriage—drawn by “four men, some with their shirts off and their bodies painted, and others with their trousers cut off above the knees and their legs painted and their faces painted in this manner, accompanied by his barbers with their razors made of an iron hoop, and constables, and band of music.” Neptune “dismounted with his wife and spoke to the Captain for permission to shave such as had not crossed the Line before, officers excepted, provided they would pay with some rum.” All of the eligible non-crossers were sent below. On the spar deck the god and his barbers stood in a rowboat filled with salt water, armed with rusty straightedges and buckets of slush and pitch. They bawled for their victims; and slowly, one at a time, at the pace of a death march, crewman after crewman was presented and subjected to the full Neptunian treatment, including “the rough ministrations of lesser gods when the deities themselves collapsed in inebriated satisfaction.”

  At sunrise three days later, the men sighted the island of San Nicolas in the Cape Verde archipelago, off the Guinea coast of Africa. Consulting the charts closely, Porter ran down among the islands, passing between Isla de May and San Jago and standing in to Porto Praya, the first rendezvous site for the squadron. Porter stayed on for five days, touring the old buildings and recording his impressions of the sweltering island with its crumbling fort, mangy dogs, and ragtag inhabitants. He gave his men shore leave and let them bring live pigs and goat kids on board. The Constitution and Hornet were not to be found, so Porter gave orders to depart. The main deck of the Essex resembled a corral as she headed west toward the coast of Brazil, but the friendly beasts needed too much water in the tropical heat, so Porter had them slaughtered for food, despite the protests of those who had their pigs drinking rum instead.

  At a cry on December 11 the crew ran to the weather rail to observe a distant vessel. Through his glass, Porter thought he saw a Royal Navy brig of war. Using British signals captured from the Alert, he tried to decoy her downwind, but her captain held steady. At sunset, she hoisted British colors, and after dark she made her night signals, fearing no danger. Porter shaped his course to intercept, and by nine he had come u
p close enough to sink her with his carronades.

  He called to her commander to haul up his courses and heave to windward to be boarded. Instead, the other vessel began maneuvering for battle, and Porter responded with musketry. Muzzles flashed in the darkness, and bullets tore into the stranger. One man fell dead, several screamed from their wounds, and the captain surrendered the ten-gun packet Nocton from Falmouth, England. Porter took $55,000 in government funds but no private property. The $55,000 would buy him enough provisions in South America to sustain a long campaign at sea.

  Lieutenant Finch took command of the Nocton with a small prize crew of Americans, including the sick man, William Klaer. Finch, with many prisoners, was to sail for an American port. Porter kept thirteen of the strongest British seamen on board the Essex, and he wrote a note advising the navy secretary to take the well-built Nocton into the navy as a cruiser.

  Next day, Porter made out the Pyramid, a high peak of the rendezvous island of Fernando da Noronha. It was another stop at the end of the world. Fruitful, tropical, and well-fortified, the isle supported a few exiled Portuguese and a gang of naked enslaved Africans whom Porter perceived as happy: “[A]s clothing is not in use here, as hunger may be gratified without labour, and as there is an appearance of cheerfulness, those that are not in chains may be supposed, in some measure, reconciled to a state as good, perhaps, as any they had formerly been accustomed to.”

  The Essex glided into the harbor disguised as a large Rio-bound Londoner, and Downes went ashore, returning a couple of hours later with news of the departure of two British naval vessels the week before. Porter understood these ships to have been Bainbridge and Lawrence. Once again he had failed to connect. There was also a letter for Porter, which he read eagerly. Between the lines was a message in invisible ink, which closed, “Go off Cape Frio to the northward of Rio Janeiro and keep a look-out for me.”

  Porter hoisted up the boat and “made sail to the southward.” Off steamy Pernambuco, he made his men wear winter woolens as punishment for some forbidden clothes-selling at Porto Praya. Sailing under English colors, the Essex “lay to under easy sail” off Frio, looking for British traffic but finding only Portuguese. Near the entrance to Rio harbor they captured the British merchant schooner Elizabeth, whose captain claimed that three heavily laden merchantmen had departed the night before in convoy with an armed schooner.

  Seeing a great chance, Porter put Midshipman Clarke and nine men on board the leaky Elizabeth and sent her in for repairs and then on for the United States. Wishing the teenager well, Porter then took off after the convoy. On the morning of December 30, sailing before fair winds, he discovered that his main topmast was about to collapse in an avalanche of wood, cordage, and canvas. Hot after his prey, he sent men aloft to secure the topgallant mast to the mainmast and set out the great wings of the studding sails to lower the pressure on the upper rigging. A heavy head sea strained the masts “excessively” and caused some light spars to fall overboard, but Porter pressed on, calculating that his quarry could go no faster than five knots while he went seven, and that shortly he would catch them, topmast or no topmast. Below, on deck, his men stood in the shadow of imminent disaster.

  Early on New Year’s Day 1813, the lookout spotted the convoy and the chase began, but soon the distant sails “proved to be nothing but small clouds rising from the horizon.” When a Portuguese shipmaster indicated that the Constitution and the Hornet, Porter’s long-lost partners, were cruising off the Bahia coast, he decided to forego the rendezvous and keep up his pursuit of the unseen and perhaps imaginary convoy.

  With a mizzen topmast as shaky as the main topmast, Porter took advantage of calm seas to make repairs. Eighty feet above the deck, the tall topmasts were removed and lowered, and soon they were back up and fastened with new trestletrees. The Essex sailed on, seeking the phantom convoy, encountering Portuguese and Spanish vessels, the latter with troops for the royalists of Montevideo at war with the independencias of Buenos Aires. Finally, having gone far from the coast and well past the date of the planned rendezvous, Porter headed back toward Cape Frio.

  Many chances for rendezvous had been missed. Bainbridge and Lawrence, Constitution and Hornet, had done all they could to find Porter at the appointed places and times. After scoring victories over British opponents, they sailed for home, giving up hopes for the ghost ship Essex, which had seemingly been swallowed by the wide waters of the South Atlantic.

  *The exact meaning of this confidential letter is not known, but its implication is that Porter had already mentioned some distinctive plan to U.S. Navy purser Samuel Hambleton, his friend and fellow Marylander. Perhaps the “first campaign” was a proposal for an extended cruise against British merchant shipping, in which the U.S. naval vessels would provision themselves off the spoils of their captures and range beyond the North Atlantic. Porter may even (as he later claimed) have mentioned to his superiors the idea of a cruise into the Pacific, but clearly this had not been endorsed, as proved by the orders that Bainbridge had sent to Porter, with approval by the navy secretary, calling for him to go to the coast of Africa, then to the coast of Brazil, and then to St. Helena to intercept British traffic from the Orient. Later, after Porter’s cruise had ended, Bainbridge invited his old friend up to Boston for a drinking bout, saying that he preferred to drown him rather than hang him—almost certainly a jocular reference to the penalty for Porter’s having disobeyed orders and gone off by himself.

  *The entire cost of construction of the Essex, about $70,000, had been borne by Salem’s anti-French Federalist merchants, fabulously wealthy from their trade in Asia and quite willing to bankroll a new battleship for the navy, which, in 1799, was engaged in a quasi-war with France.

  †The Marblehead crewmen on board the Essex, other than Cowell and Thomas, were carpenter Benjamin Wadden, seamen Enoch Milay and Thomas Russell, and ordinary seamen Samuel Dinsmore and William Sinclair.

  Chapter Four

  Off the Chart

  Porter and the men of the Essex had been out of touch with Americans since October. Low on wood, water, and provisions, he made for Santa Catarina, hundreds of miles south and far from the British warships at Rio. The Essex arrived there in the squalls and rain of January 19, having made no effort to cruise where Bainbridge had last been seen.

  As usual, Downes and a boat crew went ashore, visiting first at the island fortress, where Downes negotiated the matter of a proper salute. In the morning, after losing both wind and tide, Porter propelled his vessel toward the harbor by means of an anchor sling using drag ropes and 300-man muscle power. By breakfast, the Essex’s thirteen-gun salute was returned by the fort. He found a beachfront pool of fresh water and quickly filled many casks, and he distributed some prize money, enabling officers and men to purchase hogs, fowls, plantains, yams, bananas, onions, eggs, and other good things that were conveyed from shore by Portuguese boatmen.

  Next day, Porter heard rumors that the British blockade of South America had been strengthened and that the seventy-four-gun Montagu had sailed from Rio. He visited the port’s elderly military commander. Like so much of the Portuguese empire, the old man’s fort was crumbling away, overgrown by trees and bushes and manned by a garrison of “about twenty half-naked soldiers.” Porter noticed that the guns were honeycombed with age and mounted on rotten carriages. Surprisingly, there was a small church with a crowbar hung as a bell to call the men to services. Santa Catarina was both a penal colony and the Portuguese whaling capital of the South Atlantic; one cape down from the fort was a village of about 500 men forced to go whaling at sea in small boats and along the shore in season when the whales came in to calve. The greasy village had stores and boilers for the whale oil, which ultimately was “deposited in an immense tank, formed for the purpose in the rock, and [was] from thence transported to Portugal and elsewhere.”

  Whaling was a big business for the Portuguese, but in some British and American seaports, whaling was among the biggest of all businesses and
had continued despite the war. As Porter well knew, most of the whalemen of the Pacific, whether on British or American vessels, hailed from the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. As he also knew, American whalers and merchantmen, along with their British counterparts, had long engaged in a very active and profitable smuggling trade along the western shore of Spanish America. Spain claimed the entire coast and forbade foreign commerce of any sort, but the Spanish viceroys did not have the resources to fend off the Anglo-Americans, whom they tended to see as a single rapacious species.

  If anything, the Americans were the more dangerous breed. Their vessels came more often, and sometimes they came with a political agenda. The far-faring Yankees insisted on their rights to trade with any willing partner and proselytized for independence and republican government.* The Anglo-American sperm-whale fishery had prospered beyond the ship owners’ wildest projections. By 1800, one hundred whaleships—sixty of them British-owned, the rest from Nantucket—were making the trip to the prime grounds in the Pacific, and the numbers and profitability increased every year, as Nantucket captains and Nantucket crews manned British and American whaleships equally. Most expatriate whalemen residing in Britain considered their exile a temporary condition caused by careless and brutal governments, and they hoped to return at last to their home in the sea.

  January 21 was stormy at Santa Catarina. Lieutenant Wilmer went in by boat to wait on the governor, taking with him purser John Shaw, Doctor Richard Hoffman, Marine Lieutenant Gamble, and Gamble’s protégé William M. Feltus, the fourteen-year-old midshipman son of an Episcopal minister. The boat did not return by the end of the day nor in the evening. Two hours after midnight, Wilmer and Gamble, soaked and naked, got on board the Essex and came to Porter’s cabin to tell their tale. After they had gone ashore and purchased provisions, their overloaded boat had capsized returning, and all hands had drifted for four hours, holding fast until landing on a small island. All had survived; much could be salvaged.