by Robert Booth
Other than this mistaken chance for one-on-one naval combat, Porter was vastly indifferent to events along the coast of Chile. Much had happened, and was happening, in the Pacific that required the attention of an American commander. He might have convoyed the American whalers home from Talcahuano, and he might have stayed on to work with Poinsett in the impending conflict with the Spanish royalists, whose vessels had been preying on American shipping. Clearly the consul believed that, in the war between England and America, the triumph of an independent Chile would be a strategic victory of the greatest importance to the United States. Poinsett’s career would have been made, and Porter would have taken his place in the history books as a liberator and a hero of the Pacific far greater than Anson. But Porter had entered the ocean on his own, concerned with personal goals and fantasies that did not include freedom-fighting or nation-building.
Next morning, Porter finished loading and noticed that Governor Lastra, with flags and banners flying at the fort, had made a “great preparation” to honor the Americans. Once again, Porter went ashore. The extravaganza, in an enormous tent, was sponsored by the national leaders, who had come from Santiago: Consul-General Poinsett, members of the junto, heads of departments, President Carrera and his brothers, and various other military leaders, gallant young men like cavalry captains Diego Benavente and Manuel Rodriguez and their lieutenants. In the tent were the flags of all nations, a carpeted floor, handsome banquet tables with glinting silver services at every one, and a twenty-course dinner to be served to all, including Porter and his men and some Britons as well. The wine flowed freely, and the young Chileans became so impassioned in their toasts and speeches in praise of independence and American liberty that they had to withdraw before insulting the British further. After the feast, Porter was given a tour of the fort and then escorted to another ball, in which the ladies achieved a kind of “splendor.” Amid “much hilarity” the dance broke up at one in the morning, and Poinsett and Carrera, amigos, headed off to Santiago.
At nine o’clock in the morning the Essex herself was invaded, as the dancing ladies came on board to enjoy themselves until noon, at which time they departed to an eleven-gun salute, which was returned by Don Francisco de la Lastra, governor of Valparaiso, head of the Chilean navy, from his fortress on the harbor. Porter finished his busy week at Valparaiso by sending a letter to Poinsett to be forwarded to Bainbridge—his last effort to communicate with his former commander. Porter and the Essex then stood to sea on a fresh southerly breeze. Even if news had reached Lima of the presence of an American frigate on the coast, it was now too late for British officials there to alert the English vessels on the whaling grounds. Recognizing that, Porter set free all but one of his British prisoners, collected from Atlantic encounters.
So ended that brief but intense love affair, entirely one-sided. The rebels of Chile bade farewell to the man who had arrived by coincidence and not out of a sense of destiny, and the tawny ladies of Valparaiso waved their hankies to see the odd little captain sail away, perhaps forever.
On March 31, 1813, with the Essex only days over the horizon, the leaders of Chile learned that Viceroy Abascal had begun an invasion by sea at the south, taking advantage of the rebels’ complete lack of a navy.
Santiago went mad with patriotic fervor. Johnston, the printer, was on the scene, writing, “[I]t is impossible for me to give you an idea of the enthusiasm which prevails among the people. The palace is surrounded from morning till night by persons who offer not only their personal services to the government but bring with them their treasures also,” including money, material, and squads of soldiers fully equipped and supported by rich individuals. “The rage for military fame is likewise indescribable,” wrote Johnston. “Volunteer companies are formed and the first the government know of their organizations is when they see them armed and accoutered at their own private expense, offering their services and ready to march at a moment’s warning . . . to join the legions of the country.”
José Miguel Carrera, commander in chief, placed his political power in the hands of a junto of three prominent Santiago politicians. He trusted only one other man to join him as general of the armies: his asesor, El Consul, Roberts Poinsett, the confidential advisor needed if he were to survive the impossible mission that he had set for himself. Poinsett, still sending messages to Washington but never hearing back, questioned himself severely about this new role. Once before he had grappled with a similar question when Czar Alexander had asked him to consider fighting for Russia against the invader Napoleon. Then, Poinsett had reluctantly declined, fearing that there was no American purpose served by such service, however personally desirable. And he had been sure of his identity as an American, with no wish to become Russian. Now he knew that there were American prisoners, hundreds of them, held at Talcahuano, and that they could only be rescued by force. He knew, too, that Peruvian privateers had attacked the New York merchantman Colt and three whaleships off the upper coast. To his protests, Abascal had responded by upbraiding the Santiago junto for “harboring a French spy under the specious title of Consul-General of the United States.”
When the news arrived that the ten American whalers were among the spoils of the viceroy’s troops at the Bay of Concepcion, Poinsett decided that he “could not sit tamely, and see our flag insulted, our ships seized, and our citizens loaded (in) irons. My influence in Chile,” he wrote Secretary Monroe, “enabled me to act as I thought my duty imperiously called upon me to do, for I could no longer consider these as the acts of a neutral, but as the wanton aggressions of a man who, in the arbitrary exercise of uncontrolled power, knows no right, and who, as an ally of Great Britain, looks forward to a war with the United States as a necessary consequence of that alliance and as a justification of his violent proceedings.”
Throughout his adult life, Poinsett had wandered the world, learning from many experiences but always convinced of the superiority of the United States and equally convinced that it was his destiny to lead an army in defense of his country and its ideals. If that army was made up of Chilean rebels, and the enemy was Chilean royalists, perhaps his silent superiors in Washington would understand. “Induced by my devotion to liberty,” he wrote to Secretary Monroe, and by a desire to avenge Viceroy Abascal’s brutal treatment of Americans, “I joined the army of Chile, and directed its movements.”
General Poinsett, the chief strategist, along with General Carrera and cavalry Captain Diego Benavente, headed south to establish an army base at Talca on the Maule River, the boundary between the provinces of Santiago and Concepcion. The two general officers had no experience in commanding an army, and their army had never fought a battle. To put an army in the field was not just to resort to overwhelming violence in service to policy, but to take responsibility for feeding, clothing, arming, and sheltering the men, far from familiar surroundings and predictable resources. Without infrastructure or supply networks, Carrera would depend on local people to contribute to the upkeep of soldiers occupying their territory—always a strain, and potentially disastrous to the civilians and to the morale of the army. A short war would be best for all.
Poinsett and Carrera assumed that the enemy force was larger and better organized, with Spanish officers and mainly Peruvian Creole soldiers, but their own Creoles, they believed, would fight harder for Chile than those fighting for Spain and its phantom king. They worried that the southern Chileans might rally to the royalist cause, for lower Concepcion province had long been guarded by the Spanish king’s troops as a bulwark against the fierce Arauco tribe of Native Americans, potentially allies in war.
And there was the problem of the rebels who had sided with Rozas, Carrera’s former rival. They would not necessarily welcome the patriots coming from Santiago, even if O’Higgins did. Carrera and Poinsett could only hope that the militia of the towns of Chillan, Valdivia, and Concepcion would join them. With civil war only recently averted, no one wanted to imagine a new one pitting northern Creoles against
their southern cousins.
Poinsett knew that the concept of war—of large groups of men and boys serving as soldiers, commanded by officers and moving en masse across great distances to fight in formation—was entirely foreign to Chileans. The independence movement, to date, had been political, not military; no one other than a few leaders had been asked to give up his safety and his place in society and risk his life for something larger. War was an event that took place in Europe, with real battlefields, famous generals and strategists, and vast numbers of regular troops led by trained officers. Nothing like that existed here.
Poinsett was, however, thrilled to get his chance. He had steered the Chilean rebellion in the direction of a republic and toward outright alliance with the United States. His own nation was at war with the British, who were backing the royalists in Spain. Carrera’s defeat of the Spanish invader would ensure that the revolution continued, and a decisive defeat might inspire the United States to recognize Chilean nationhood and to support “the one great movement” that Poinsett had envisioned for an independent South America. It could start right now, with him as catalyst.
*Long after he had come on the Chilean coast, Porter, in his journal, wrote that he had realized that he might be useful in protecting American whalers—an afterthought.
*Perhaps the Americans were Captain Massena Monson and first mate Edward Barnewall of the merchant vessel Colt, moored in the harbor, to whom Porter evidently detached a couple of his sailors toward a navy for Lastra and Carrera.
Chapter Seven
Americans at War
Soon after leaving the Bay of Valparaiso to hunt for British whalers, Porter experienced a moment of excitement when he spotted a whaleship, but she proved to be American, the George of Nantucket. Her captain, Benjamin Worth, was the sort of man Porter had been seeking since entering the Pacific—a man with answers. Worth, forty-five, was an old salt; he had been at sea for thirty years, eighteen of them as a shipmaster. He had ranged the Peruvian whaling grounds for more than a decade and had been the first American to ascend the coast and hunt sperm whales in the Pacific Northwest. Now, coming aboard the Essex, the efficient Captain Worth lamented the time and money he had lost in Lima, having been captured by the Spanish and then forced to go through a lawsuit to regain the freedom of the seas. Porter questioned him about English whalers, and Worth mentioned that a few days earlier, while cruising with three other American vessels, he had encountered two English armed whalers whose captains had politely reported that their two governments were at war—the first the Americans had known of it. Worth claimed that the English “had no orders to capture American vessels” but “were in daily expectation of authority to that effect.”
Worth had further heard that one American ship had already been captured by a British privateer, the recently arrived Seringapatam, but that Lima authorities—hoping to preserve the neutrality of their port and avoid antagonizing Americans—had refused to accept her as a prize. The Seringapatam was large, well built, heavily armed, and said to be commanded by “a bold and unprincipled adventurer” whose main interest was prizes, not whales. The captured American ship, Worth understood, was being sailed by an English crew to Cape Horn and on to St. Helena, off Africa, to join a convoy bound for England.* If Porter thought of giving chase, he thought again when, he claimed, Worth urged him to head for the Galápagos Islands, where many American whalers were unaware of the new war and were “entirely exposed to attack and capture by the armed English [whale] ships in those seas, carrying from 14 to 20 guns.”
This was exactly what Porter wanted to hear. On he sailed to hunt the hunters, headed, at last, for a rendezvous. Next morning, March 25, at daybreak, the lookout spotted a sail to the northeast, and before long they came up with the Nantucket whaleship Charles, out thirteen months under Grafton Gardner, who told a harrowing tale. Four months earlier, whaling off the coast of Peru, he and his men had been attacked by a Spanish colonial privateer and sent as prisoners into Callao, the port of Lima. As with Captain Worth more recently, Gardner had sued for his freedom and won it. Back at sea, the Charles had fallen in with two other Nantucket whalers and together they had cruised until just two days before. Approaching the port of Coquimbo in northern Chile, they had been intercepted by two armed vessels, one English, the other Spanish. The whalers had crowded on sail as the fast-moving strangers had begun firing their guns. Gardner and the Charles, farthest off, had kept pulling away, but the New Bedford whalers Walker, under Paul West, and Barclay, under Gideon Randall, had surrendered.
Next day off Coquimbo, Porter spied a sail, and by noon the Essex had drawn close enough to see that she carried American whaleboats and an array of heavy cannon. When she hoisted Spanish colors, Porter responded with the flag of Britain, and the two vessels closed within a mile. Porter decided that she was “one of the picaroons that had been for a long time harassing our commerce”—but his English disguise would guarantee the stranger’s good behavior. Suddenly, the Spanish privateer fired a shot across his bow, which so infuriated Porter that he almost forgot that “the insult was not intended for the American flag.” He lobbed a few high shots to show the power that he was holding back.
A boat was lowered from the other vessel, but the armed occupants were ordered to return with their papers and an apology. This they did, and her second lieutenant informed the “English” commander that she was the Nereyda, fifteen guns, sailing for the Viceroy of Lima and as a friend of the British, but under a commission that had expired three months before. To Porter, this made them pirates. Proudly the young officer related that the Nereyda had recently captured two American whalers, the Barclay and the Walker, and that when he had arrived at Coquimbo with the two prizes, Captain Perry of the British brig Nimrod, eighteen guns, had muscled his way over to the Walker, dismissed her Peruvian crew, and sailed away with the American vessel. The sick captain of the Nereyda had gamely begun pursuit to reclaim his stolen goods, and had mistaken the Essex and the Charles for the Nimrod and the Walker—thus the firing of a bow shot.
Porter summoned the first lieutenant on board and toyed with his young visitor. The lieutenant, who had not noticed the trappings and uniforms of the U.S. Navy all around him, explained that Peruvians were great admirers of the British despite the piratical actions of Perry—and that “his sole object was the capture of American vessels.” In fact, he was holding more than twenty Americans—the Barclay’s crew and the captain and part of the crew of the Walker—imprisoned belowdecks. Porter played out his hand, demanding a visit from the American captain of the Walker and a crewman of the Barclay. Upon their arrival, he took them aside and said that they were on board an American frigate. Amazed and overjoyed, Captain West reported that the Nereyda “was a pirate, that she took everything she came across,” that he and the other twenty-three Americans had been “plundered” by their captors solely because they were Americans. Whalers, with holds full of oil, they had done no smuggling.
Returning to the deck, Porter ordered the dousing of British colors and the raising of the big American flag, accompanied by two cannonballs fired into the Nereyda, whose captain promptly surrendered. Next day Porter had Downes heave overboard her guns, ammunition, arms, light sails, and topmasts. To the Yankees’ surprise, all of her cannon but one were made of iron, and their shot was copper—the reverse of other nations’, which were cast in bronze, firing iron shot. Porter then brought the liberated American whalemen on board the Essex.
Porter’s handling of this situation was disingenuous at best, for he had heard repeatedly from American whaling captains that Callao’s Spanish privateers, and not English whaleships, were the problem in the Pacific. Although Porter had treated her as a nuisance freelancing against American shipping, the Nereyda actually sailed under Abascal’s patent as an instrument of anti-American policy, and her preying on Americans was cause for formal protest if not outright reprisal. In fact, Abascal had launched a full-scale war against Chile, which included an order to impou
nd all American vessels found in Chilean waters.
The Spanish authorities at Callao must have been horrified to see an American battleship enter their port, evidently part of an invasion by Chilean and American forces. Callao, as it happened, had never been more vulnerable, since Viceroy Abascal had just dispatched a five-vessel fleet for Chile and so relied for protection on the Nereyda, which Porter, almost by accident and certainly without due understanding of its significance, had just captured and neutered. Unlike Poinsett, who was opposed to Abascal’s Spanish royalists in the name of the republic, Porter did not wish to antagonize the Spanish viceroy if it would interfere with his pursuit of British whaleships. He sent in the Nereyda and her crew with a letter for Abascal, deploring their capture of two American whalers and their crews and noting that her officers had admitted to “cruising as the allies of Great Britain,” although Porter was sure that “they had not your Excellency’s authority for such proceedings.” His certainty was, of course, totally misplaced. His obsession with British whalers had left him unaware, or unwilling to accept, that Abascal had declared war on the rebel state of Chile and had adopted a policy of aggression against Americans as part of that war.
