by Robert Booth
Abascal had landed 1,500 troops under Juan Francisco Sanchez at Talcahuano in April, to combine with Pareja’s army, making a force of perhaps 3,000 infantrymen and 5,000 horsemen. Poinsett would contend that Abascal had no right to invade the province of Concepcion, which was under “a government acknowledged by the regency of Spain.” On May 15, Carrera’s army encountered the Sanchez-Pareja forces marching toward Chillan, near the town of San Carlos. A major battle commenced “at 11 o’clock in the forenoon and was fought with great obstinacy on both sides,” recalled Poinsett. Sanchez, with twenty cannon, drew up the royalists in a strong position on a hillside, with cavalry at the flanks. Carrera, with 1,200 infantry troops and 6,000 cavalry, consulted with Poinsett about forcing a decisive all-out battle.
The attack began as planned, but Juan José Carrera did not coordinate the movements of the second division with the rest of the troops. In a bayonet charge toward the center, his men were decimated by the royalist artillery, while the patriot artillery fell silent as the guns went crashing off their worn-out carriages. Under Mackenna and Luis Carrera, the infantry regrouped and engaged the enemy for more than three hours of hard fighting and heavy losses. Carrera and Poinsett continued to confer. If this were to be the major battle of the campaign—perhaps of the war—Poinsett decided that, after all his strategizing and advising, he must take the chance for glory. Saddling up and presenting himself to a large detachment of cavalrymen, he led a charge into the smoke and chaos at the center of the fighting, then swerved and began a hard gallop to the enemy’s right, outflanking the royalists’ own cavalry and finally wheeling about and striking their infantry from the rear. The result was mayhem in the ranks until the artillery blew holes in Poinsett’s hussars, but nightfall brought a cessation.
The Pareja-Sanchez army marched on in the darkness, crossing the Rio Nuble and taking up quarters at the well-protected city of Chillan. Carrera, with his men badly bloodied, decided not to pursue. For a month, the patriot army camped in the vicinity of Chillan, probing its defenses. The strategy debate continued in Carrera’s camp, with Poinsett arguing for taking the seaports and ignoring Chillan—let the royalists remain holed up where they could do no damage and claim no advantage in the rest of the province.
Having proven himself in battle, Poinsett had the trust of the Chilean soldiers. In mid-June, with a detachment of 400 men, he marched off toward the coast. Carrera soon followed.
Just before dawn on June 29, the imprisoned American whaling captains at Talcahuano were about to try to make their escape when the town was rocked by the thunder of artillery. People poured into the streets, screaming and crying. On the heights overlooking the harbor, they could see a gun emplacement manned by a large company, with three cannons firing down on the harbor. The target was not the town or its vessels; it was the small fort that guarded the harbor’s entrance and the nearby barracks of the royalist soldiers.
A small army of attackers came shouting and marching down the hillsides, carrying the tri-color flag of Chile. After “a smart action,” the field “was carried by storm.” The patriot commander sent a rider under a flag of truce to demand the unconditional surrender of the port. The royalist officers, unable to organize a defense, set fire to their artillery and ran up the white flag at their fort. Talcahuano had been liberated by El Consul, Roberts Poinsett.
General Poinsett was greeted with jubilation in the streets. His first act was to free the American whalemen, and, in their place, to imprison the royalist soldiers. He sent a gunboat out into the bay to intercept the royalists’ main warship, now laden with refugee treasure, but she was too strong to stop. Then came word that Carrera had taken the port of Concepcion. Poinsett’s strategy had paid off; the patriot army now held all of Concepcion province outside Chillan. Poinsett set his men to repairing the damaged cannons that the royalists had torched, and began improving the defenses by land and sea. He decided to fly the Spanish flag in case a royalist vessel should come calling. Sure enough, a British privateering whaler sailed into port, and Poinsett stripped it of armament. A few days later a large ship arrived from Callao with several Spanish officers on board. Poinsett made them his prisoners, and they told him that his ridiculous navy at Valparaiso had been captured before it had left the bay and that his ships and his foolish American sailors had been delivered to Viceroy Abascal.
Colonel Bernardo O’Higgins soon appeared at Talcahuano with fresh troops from the area of his home plantation, Las Canteras, which had been destroyed by royalists. His troop was augmented by many soldiers who had defected to him on his northward march. Carrera massed the combined patriot army on the outskirts of Chillan, and there began a siege. They had hoped it would not come to this. Although Pareja soon died there, his place was taken by Sanchez. Chillan was well fortified and well provisioned, and the royalist troops had comfortable quarters. The winter rains came down, and the rebel soldiers suffered from poor shelter and scanty meals. Finally, they were forced to pillage the surrounding countryside for their subsistence. The locals turned against them, and the rebel army slowly dissolved in the incessant downpour and cold mud.
Desperate to break the impasse, Juan Mackenna lured a large royalist force outside the city defenses, and on August 2, Mackenna and Luis Carrera attacked with 800 men, infantry and cavalry, supported by artillery. Their assault succeeded, and the enemy forces retreated into the city, hotly pursued. Inside, the commanders lost control of their men. The hungry rebels broke into stores and houses, at first for food and drink and then for looting and rape. Lucho’s officers finally exerted their authority, and the rebels withdrew. Next day, the attack was renewed, and the patriots penetrated into the city in the face of great resistance. Hundreds were killed on both sides, and the householders formed a third army, organized as guerillas and firing at both rebels and royalists. Gaining the central plaza of Chillan, the patriot vanguard was torn apart by concentrated artillery fire, and again the assault devolved into mayhem.
Poinsett, opposed by Mackenna in strategic counsels, decided to return to Santiago late in July. “Having obtained the end I harbored in taking up arms, I left the army and returned to Santiago.” He was ready to go home to the United States, tormented that he “remained banished at a moment when my country was engaged in a glorious struggle against her natural enemy, a moment which I had always looked forward to with hope and anxiety,” as he wrote to his cousin on September 2, 1813. “I returned last night from the army of Chile, whose movements I had directed in a short and brilliant campaign, during which the province of Concepcion has been reconquered.” Poinsett worried about the correctness of his fighting for Chile. “I may be blamed by government and by my fellow citizens, but I have acted right.” He was certain of it, since he had used the opportunity to liberate ten American vessels and more than 200 American sailors, and he was confident in his own judgment, having been “so long a solitary wanderer that I am accustomed to content myself with my own approbation.”
To Secretary Monroe, he was more particular in defense of his actions, citing many evidences of American vessels that had been captured or harassed by the Spanish privateers: “I shall take an early opportunity of enclosing such documents as will convince you that, although my conduct does not appear to have been that of a neutral agent, it is justified by my obligation to protect the flag of my country from insult, and the property of her citizens from lawless and piratical depredations.” He noted his own success in helping to direct the patriot army, and he reported on the success of Porter and the frigate Essex “in her cruise in these seas,” sending in two British whalers as prizes, and, at Callao, defeating the Lima privateer that had captured two American whaleships.
Despite these successes, Poinsett did not wish to remain in Chile. He had made a huge contribution to the creation of the new republic. He had done everything possible to influence Carrera in a direction favorable to the United States, and he had guided the patriot armies to victory in their battles against the royalists. But he had
become controversial, not just as a partisan of the patriots but as an adherent of Carrera. He could not justify continuing as a leader in a foreign country unless he had orders to do so, and he had heard nothing at all from Madison or Monroe for more than a year, which left him “shut out from the world.” He had learned that the war against the British was not going well at home, and he felt that his patriotic duty—as well as his personal ambition—was to lead troops into battle in the uniform of the U.S. Army. He noted that the Essex afforded a possible means of escape; “should she touch here on her way home, the temptation will be too great to resist.” On the back of the letter, he wrote, “to be quoted: anxiety to return to serve in the war at home.”
*The Nantucket whaler Edward, with its captain, Seth Folger, fell captive to the British fourteen-gun ship Seringapatam and its captain, William Stavers, dispatched from the Orient to harass American shipping in the Pacific and to do some whaling as well. Seringapatam was not a letter-of-marque; she had no official government commission to prey on enemy shipping.
Chapter Eight
A-whaling
By mid-April 1813, David Porter had been at sea for nearly six months on his self-assigned mission and had yet to sight his first British whaler. He wrote in his journal that in the fabled Galápagos archipelago, 600 miles off the coast of South America, he was sure to find these vessels that were “the constant subject of our conversation and solicitude; and we did not calculate on a number less than ten or twelve; indeed we calculated on making more prizes there than we could man, and hoped to be thus indemnified for all loss of time, fatigues, and anxieties.” His search did not include the American whaling fleet, formerly represented as being in great peril at the Galápagos: his sole interest was in capturing British ships.
Heading west from the continent, Porter wondered about himself, that he would come so far, at such peril, without permission and without any guarantee of redemption. He could not discuss his fears and doubts with his officers or allow his misgivings to affect his public role as the decisive leader of this cruise. At night in his cabin, he tried to repress his fears of disgrace for running off into the wrong sea, mad for glory. The cure for his dread was to hunt for the British even as they hunted the whale. He knew that he would have a huge advantage in firepower, experience, and attitude if he could find them. Where had they gone? Had they anticipated his arrival? Had the armed British whalers captured the unarmed American whalers and sailed off toward the Orient?
He entered the volcanic archipelago on April 17, 1813. Charles Island proved a distraction; he explored it thoroughly to see if it might yield food and water enough that American vessels, in future, would not be required to put in at the off-limits Spanish ports to the east. Whaling captains had been coming to these islands for thirty years, but Porter’s ego would not permit him to learn from them, and he was enough of a scientist, historian, and navigator to welcome all this newness and try to make himself a public authority on the Pacific. Like Captain Cook, he was attentive to the public-relations opportunity; he indulged in fiction in his journal—flattering himself and puffing his cruise into an epic—while accurately describing the features of this exotic part of the world.
Porter’s next stop was forty-five miles west at the island of Albemarle and the whalers’ “general rendezvous” of Banks’ Bay. In the manner of a conqueror, if not a discoverer, he bestowed names on the already named geography that he encountered, although he did not bother to take soundings or chart the coast. Behind “Point Essex” they found a small hidden bay—no whalers in sight—and a very good landing. Porter and company started off into the bushes but then stopped short in sheer terror; they stood amid acres of large iguanas, four-foot-long mini-dragons, thousands of them, all glaring at the intruders, who “supposed them prepared to attack us.” The men made a feint at their enemy and “discovered them to be the most timid of animals, and in a few moments [we] knocked down hundreds of them with our clubs.” Most of the dead iguanas were left for carrion, but those that were carried off “proved to be excellent eating.”
The royalty of the Galápagos bestiary were the giant tortoises, numerous on almost every island and big enough for a man to ride. Porter discerned slight differences among the tortoises from island to island: on one the carapace might be thicker; on another, the feet might be larger. Tortoises, they found, were even more delicious than iguanas, and they could be stored alive in the hold of a vessel for months at a time, surviving without food or water.
Twenty-two years before Charles Darwin would visit the Galápagos aboard HMS Beagle, Porter closely observed the island wildlife and thought about what he saw. He had no explanation for how the Galápagos came to be populated with “their supply of tortoises and guanas, and other animals of the reptile kind,” but it did seem “that those islands have every appearance of being newly created, and that those perhaps are the only part of the animal creation that could subsist on them.”
Although Porter kept imagining that the British fleet lay just ahead, around the next point, unaware of his approach, the reality was otherwise. No matter what one tried to do in the Galápagos, the islands had a different plan; all the rules were skewed there, and nothing was quite as it seemed. Compass headings and course plots were subject to powerful unseen forces, strong currents overruled the tides and winds, and a good sailing breeze might suddenly drop to a dead calm for five days.
Perversely reading these phenomena as portents, Porter predicted to his men that they had reached the moment of triumph. Full of manic inspiration, he broke his own rule against sailing among the islands by night and headed for Narborough “in order that we might have the whole of the next day for securing our prizes in Banks’ Bay.” His prediction of epic prize-taking on the morrow represented a big risk, and he slept little that night.
In the morning he was proved a false prophet. The men, he knew, were buzzing; his officers were wary. Some now wondered about his mental balance, and the impetuous Porter had his own doubts. He experienced “great uneasiness” and “could not resist those anxious feelings, which cannot be repelled at such moments.” For no particular reason, he had set himself up for failure, and failure had obliged. Porter and the whole company of the Essex had crossed into a zone of delusion in which the captain misjudged almost everything he encountered.
He placed his crew on high alert and repeatedly sent them to battle stations, but the enemy remained a phantom, and the Essex sailed on. For two days they fought only the currents, and the men seethed toward a state of psychosis. They could stand it no more, and began climbing the rigging until the Essex was top-heavy with “seamen and officers whose anxiety had taken them aloft” to scan the great waters. Finally, the tension was broken with a cry of Sail ho!, and then another, which “seemed to electrify every man on board.” From the manic heights, however, they descended in “sudden dejection,” as the sails “proved to be only white appearances on the shore,” ghostly images that left them fooled and profoundly shaken.
The crew could not trust their captain. Even with his spyglass, he was literally seeing things. Three hundred Americans now felt kidnapped, imprisoned in the Galápagos with no prey to be found and perhaps no way out. If Porter was wrong about the British whalers, what else was he wrong about? James Rynard and others began questioning their captain’s fitness and grousing about this cruise that seemed more like one man’s delusion than an operation of the U.S. Navy. The islands had come to seem haunted, with Porter himself a specter among the shape-shifting Encantadas, not so much enchanted as accursed.
After six days among the islands, hearing his men, Porter decided to break the spell and clear out for South America. The Essex, however, could not buck the current; for another six days she was borne away against the captain’s will. On April 28, Porter passed “a sleepless and anxious night” and had just nodded off when, at dawn, a dozen voices cried out “Sail ho!”
All doubts suddenly fled, and Porter was restored to credibility; he had found
his white whale. The sail belonged to a large ship bearing west. Jubilantly, they chased her and then discovered two more. Porter ordered the raising of British colors and their large pennant reading “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” flown from the main topmast.
The mighty Essex came alongside the much-smaller British whaleship Montezuma under Captain Baxter of Nantucket, with a largely American crew and 1,400 barrels of sperm oil. Affecting an English accent, Porter lured Baxter on board and sprang the trap. Poor Baxter, now a prisoner, was glad to see the wind drop with eight miles of ocean between the Essex and her other prey, hull down on the horizon, but Porter had his men pursue with three cutters, a gig, a pinnace, a whaleboat, and a jolly boat. In the fierce heat and dead calm, men and boys strained at the oars and closed the gap, converging on the 280-ton Georgiana, under Captain Pitts, with a crew of Yankee whalemen. Midshipman Feltus wrote that his cutter boldly pulled up under her stern: “She had two guns pointed at us; we immediately hoisted the American ensign, [whereupon] the ship gave us three cheers, which we did not return [but] boarded her. She immediately struck to us. We manned her and went to the next. She had one gun run out abaft and one in each gangway and ready to fire. We ran alongside and boarded” the 275-ton Policy, whose Captain Bowman prudently struck her colors.
The frigate sailed on, going nowhere, with the poky Montezuma in tow and the Barclay to starboard and the Policy to port. Late on the afternoon of May 28, the lookouts spotted what proved to be the British whaler Atlantic, mounting six eighteen-pounders and commanded by Obed Wyer of Nantucket, just up from the Bay of Concepcion. The ruse of a fake flag and an English accent sufficed to prompt a visit from Wyer, from whom Porter learned much about naval matters in the South Atlantic, including the fact that HMS Java, searching for the Essex, instead had encountered Bainbridge and the Constitution, which, incredibly, had sent the great battleship to the bottom.
