by Robert Booth
Finally, Johnston discerned that Supreme Director Lastra, and men like him, had never wanted a republic or even a real revolution. They had held office quietly amid turmoil, plotting with the British, waiting for their chance to emerge from the shadows. “The intrigues of this man with the English have reduced the country to a state of dependence on, and placed them entirely at the mercy of,” London, “whose emissary [Hillyar] will either deliver them over to the paternal embraces of their mother country, or take possession of their territory in the name of His Britannic Majesty, which, from the confused and presently exhausted state of Chile, I think would not be impossible for the British here to accomplish.”
As he boarded the Essex Junior on April 27, 1814, Johnston noted that “Don Juan José Carrera, who made good his escape to the capital, has been banished from the country as a reward for his meritorious services as a statesman and a general, whose brilliant talents, it was feared by his loving kinsman Lastra, might eclipse his own.” Banishment was not enough: Lastra had put Juan Mackenna to work writing a scurrilous report about the Carreras in order to discredit them and prevent their return to power.
Johnston had arrived in Chile as an adventurer and an idealist, hoping to contribute to the creation of a republic by the power of his printing press. He had come to love the country and its people and to admire Carrera as the George Washington of its revolution, and he had stayed to fight for independence. He had suffered betrayal, imprisonment, and defeat, and in the end all he had was memories: “The foresail of the Essex Junior is set, and a boat waiting to take this letter on shore. Neither Captain Barnewall, myself, or any other person belonging to the Colt, have received a farthing from the government for our services and sufferings in their cause. Adieu!”
At Fort Madison, Madison’s Island—Porter’s new name for Nuku Hiva—Lieutenant John Gamble, twenty-two, of the U.S. Marines, had command of Madisonville and four prize vessels: Greenwich, Seringapatam, Sir Andrew Hammond, and New Zealander. Lacking Porter’s capacity for self-delusion, he could hardly be happy with his assignment. Upon his departure in December, Porter had told Gamble to hold the place as a refuge in case he and Downes returned for repairs. Gamble had suspected even then that the war maker was not coming back. In Nooaheevah, at Anna Maria Bay—Gamble refused to use Porter’s names—there would be no new adventures. He was marooned, probably for months, in the drudgery and boredom of waiting, among natives who might not be so friendly if they were to discover how few men he really had.
Gamble could rely on his midshipmen, Clapp and Feltus. William Feltus, fifteen, had the makings of a top naval officer and had become Gamble’s protégé early in the voyage. He was serious and brave beyond his years, and zealous in doing his duty. Benjamin Clapp, twenty-three, was bright and competent, although, like Gamble, not a mariner. He was a fur trader, and had sailed from New York in the Albatros bound for Astoria on the Northwest Coast. Astoria, however, had been sold, so Clapp had sailed with Captain Hunt and crew for Hawaii and then on to the Marquesas, where Clapp had joined the navy rather than go to China.
The remaining crewmen were not nearly so dependable. Twelve were short-timers, slated to sail away soon in the New Zealander, eighteen were former slacker crewmen of the Essex, and six were prisoners of war. To Porter, who had dumped them on Gamble, they were “a set of lazy, thoughtless fellows who would sooner risk a general massacre than arouse from their stupid apathy.” Another two, Coffin and White, were roaming free on the island. It would not be easy to keep even the good men happy or busy, especially with all of the girls around. Gamble warned his young officers to watch everyone closely and immediately report any misbehavior. He did not have Porter’s relationships with Gattenewa and Mouina or with the interpreter Wilson, whom he distrusted. On the other hand, Gamble could rely on George Ross and William Brudenell, the sandalwood traders—sober, sensible, and friendly with the native leaders.
Of Gamble’s inherited Essex crewmen, the highest ranking, boatswain Thomas Belcher, was an Englishman, an older fellow plagued with syphilis, proud of his service in the 1770s with Captain Cook in the Pacific. The six prisoners were English too, and six more were English recruits from the whalers. Since America was at war with England, Gamble did not regard these men as he did his eight American-born sailors. At first he kept all of them gardening near the fort; then he ordered that hundreds of barrels of sperm oil be transferred from the other three vessels to the New Zealander.
The Taipi and Hapa’a, dropouts from “the great American family,” assessed the situation right away: Opotee was gone, and his moon-troopers with him. Only a skeleton crew remained, too few to keep them from raiding the village. They had started by stealing pigs, setting fire to the brush above the wall, and running off with provisions. Gamble took a few hostages and strengthened his defenses, employing all hands in moving six guns from the Seringapatam up the high hill to the fort. The rainy season began, and Gamble had to deal with downpours, high winds, and securing his vessels moored in the bay. Despite illness among his men and unrest among the English prisoners who worked alongside them, Gamble got the New Zealander loaded with two thousand barrels of oil and sent her away under John King and a small crew, cheering as they sailed for America. Gamble and his men sorely wished they could have gone too.
Unavoidably, Ben Clapp and the boy Will Feltus were given much authority over the crewmen. In his journal, Feltus recorded his typical duties, which included inspecting the vessels to make sure that natives were not aboard. On a January 20 visit to the Seringapatam, he and Clapp broke up a raucous party, and Gamble “punished the men and also the women, and turned the latter on shore.” Now distrustful of the crewmen, Gamble sent his middies to collect lances and harpoons from their vessels and to make an inventory of the stores and provisions. Discipline was maintained to an uncomfortable degree, with watches kept strictly on the ships and at the fort and village. Isaac Coffin, deserter, had been brought in by one of the sandalwood traders and put in irons in the Sir Andrew Hammond along with John Robinson, an Englishman caught stealing. Relations were not improved by the draining, on January 22, of “the last can of grog.”
Running low on supplies, Gamble sailed off in the Hammond looking for swine and vegetables. After trouble at the island of Dominica, he and his crew went on to Cook’s Resolution Bay at Christiana Island, where Gamble enjoyed several days of productive barter, all the while fielding questions about “when the ships were to leave the Bay, and when Opotee was expected to return.” After nine days away, Gamble found “all things in proper order” back at Nooaheevah.
February came and went without any word from Porter. The rains continued, and some of the men grew desperate. Here, soaked each day, with the girls still beckoning, they were forced to drill and work under a couple of officious boys, for a master who was hardly more than a boy himself. The U.S. Navy had come to seem a foreign concept to men who only wanted to join the natives in their pursuit of happiness. Toward the end of the month, Gamble lost the excellent John Witter, who drowned in the surf, and early in March Isaac Coffin ran off again. That evening the lieutenant armed his eight best men and went off down the Teii valley. They found Coffin “dozing in the midst of a group of natives” and dragged him off to the beach to be flogged. When Gamble scolded the Teii, they retorted that Coffin had a right to visit and that his punishment, thirty-six lashes and confinement below, was “illiberal and unjust.”
On the night of March 18, the watchmen of the Greenwich reported that a boat was missing along with muskets, cartridges, clothes, boards, tools, two compasses, a hat, five barrels of powder, and an English ensign. Also missing were Isaac Coffin, John Robinson, and John Welch, the latter of whom, after liberating the other two from their irons, had rowed over to the Seringapatam to take on one more, Peter Swook, an original crewmember of the Essex. Further, they had been careful to stave in Gamble’s blue pulling boat, the fastest of those that might have been used to chase them.
Next morning at breakfast time, the deck
watch cried out that the natives were about to attack on shore. Gamble hopped up on deck and saw a large crowd headed for the camp. He ordered the cannons primed with grapeshot and summoned the men ashore to come to the Greenwich with their muskets, but the natives were unarmed and carrying great quantities of breadfruit and bananas. Someone—Gamble suspected Wilson, the interpreter—had told the Teii that the American vessels would be departing in a few days and that Opotee would never return. The bundles of edibles had been given in gratitude at this splendid news.
The weather continued stormy, and on March 26 the Seringapatam parted her lower anchor cable and was headed for shore when the men on board the Sir Andrew Hammond hauled her back with spring lines connecting the two vessels. The storm kept up, and next morning the ships were driven toward the rocks. It was only “by indefatigable exertions [that] they were both drawn into deeper water, and soon secured.” The day after, in a squall 4,500 miles to the east, David Porter made his fateful bid to drive the Essex out of Valparaiso Harbor and into the open sea.
In the rains of early April at Nukuhiva, Madisonville’s buildings flooded and torrents went “rushing down the hills in beautiful cascades.” Gamble suspected that Porter, gone for four months, had met with disaster. Gamble provisioned the Seringapatam and the Sir Andrew Hammond until they were loaded down by their sterns, and on April 14 he had the men commence the two-week process of rigging the ships for a long voyage. The Seringapatam was given an armament of ten long nine-pounders, four twelve-pound carronades, and four long six-pounders, while the Sir Andrew Hammond was fitted with fourteen carronades. Lieutenant Gamble was under orders to remain at Madisonville for another seven weeks.
The Teii held an island-wide banquet as part of the festival of coeeca, which was protected by a powerful tapu forbidding harm or injury. Given this, several of Gamble’s men were allowed to observe. At the grand public square, on the Teii’s largest paepae, feasting and dancing went on for three days, and indeed it was an unforgettable Enana love-in.
But Gamble’s misgivings did not go away. On May 3, he discovered that the boat’s sail had been stolen by someone on board the Greenwich, probably the boatswain’s mate, Thomas Belcher. Gamble asked around, and the next day was told that “most of the men were forming a scheme whether to mutiny or make their escape in one of the ships, and that Belcher and four of the prisoners of war were the chief instigators of the plan.” Gamble continued his consolidation of arms, removing all pistols and muskets to the Greenwich. On May 6, the nature of the coming storm became apparent, as the conspirators could no longer hide their anxiety and determination to bring about “an awful explosion.” Gamble might have moved at this point, destroying two of the ships and sailing away on the third with the men who were loyal, but he was twenty-two and had his orders, and so he stayed on, knowing that something terrible was likely to happen.
On May 7, the breeze was light and the weather clear. Gamble had some men caulking the decks, replacing rigging, and moving oil tanks on board the Seringapatam, the beautiful teak vessel built for Tipu Saib, the last unconquered sultan of India, in his doomed effort to fight off the British Royal Navy. After lunch, Clapp went over the side on a staging to paint her port topsides, Feltus watched the riggers, and Gamble supervised the placement of two oil tanks below. From the deck, he ordered a man to get cracking, and the Englishman defied him, saying he’d be damned if he did any more work on board the ship. “Scarcely had the words escaped his lips, when all the men on the deck threw down their hats and made the same declaration.” One of them drew a large knife from his shirt, and cried for the rest to get hold of Lieutenant Gamble, who dashed to the railing. The men pulled him away and threw him back on the deck. “After struggling a short time and receiving many bruises,” recalled Gamble, “I was prostrated and my hands and my legs tied.”
“What do you mean by this treatment?” demanded Gamble.
“Say another word and I’ll beat your brains out,” yelled the caulker, Martin Stanley, making as if to bash him with his maul. “We’ve been your prisoners long enough in this damned place! We’re not your slaves, and we will have our liberty!”
Trussed with his legs painfully crossed, Gamble was hauled to the hatch. “Then they threw me on the second deck,” he wrote, “thence dragged me into the cabin and confined me in the run,” the pitch-black crawl space under the cabin floor. The midshipmen were soon overpowered, trussed, and put in the run with Gamble.
The seven mutineers gave three cheers and hoisted their flag into the rigging of the Seringapatam, an English vessel once more. One party went on shore to spike the guns and take the powder of Fort Madison, while the other went to the Greenwich and Sir Andrew Hammond to spike their guns and carry off their small arms, muskets, and valuables. Then they sent for Robert White, who had been made a pariah by David Porter. As the ship got under way, the three prisoners yelled that they could not breathe. The two boys were allowed to crawl out and stay in the cabin. After a while, Gamble was freed and marched to the cabin and seated on a chest near the skylight, with two men guarding him “with his own pistols, loaded and cocked.”
At about eight in the evening, the ship cleared the bay and entered the open sea, and just then one of Gamble’s guards shot him. At the sound of gunfire, five muskets were pointed down through the skylight and the guards yelled, “Don’t fire, don’t fire!” which saved all the lives in the cabin. Gamble had been shot through the heel just below the ankle, and the boys did not know what to do. Soon they were untied, led up to the spar deck, and told that “a boat was in readiness to receive them.” Gamble protested that they could not be sent away without arms to defend themselves against savages—it was “wanton barbarity.” The thirteen mutineers agreed with Gamble and gave him two muskets and a powder keg and sent him and his men over the side, where they found William Worth and Richard Stansbury sitting in a half-swamped boat.
Night had fallen when they shoved off from the steep sides of the Seringapatam, Gamble’s own prize, so brilliantly captured in the Galápagos. Now, under short sail, she moved away by the light of the rising moon, under the king’s flag. A face appeared at the stern railing. Feltus saw that it was the boatswain’s mate, old Tom Belcher, who “called out to Lieutenant Gamble and several others to witness that he was obliged by the mutineers to stay.” Perhaps it was true.
Several miles off Nukuhiva, the castaways made their way across the peaceful nighttime sea. Clapp bailed, Gamble steered, and the other three rowed hard. After many hours they stood on the deck of the Greenwich, where the five remaining Americans, including the very ill John Pettenger, happily greeted their officers as men returned from the dead. They were informed that the interpreter Wilson, Porter’s great friend, had been the chief fomenter of the uprising and had already led the plundering of the Sir Andrew Hammond and the pillaging of Madisonville. Gamble got his wound dressed, then passed out from exhaustion and loss of blood.
When he awoke next morning, the young lieutenant found himself in a nearly hopeless situation. Where was Porter? No word had come from Valparaiso. Although the six months had not yet passed, it was time to go. The Hammond was fittest for a sea voyage, so Gamble had all hands move sails and other items from the Greenwich and rig her for sailing. He sent some of his men inland to recover the items that Wilson had taken, and he urged Ross and Brudenell, the traders, to come away with them. For much of the day, the men moved goods from the fort and the village down to the beach.
After sunrise on May 9, the day of departure, Feltus and Clapp and the men went ashore to raft the material out to the ships. With help from the Teii, they loaded up and arrived at the Greenwich for breakfast at eight. An hour later, they were back on shore when Brudenell came running down, saying that the natives had his muskets and Wilson was at his house and they’d better come quick if they wanted to catch him. With one musket between them, seamen Worth and Coddington went off after Wilson, but soon they reported that he had escaped to a distant tribe. Feltus received
Gamble’s permission to lead a party to Wilson’s house to recover the stolen items, especially the barrels of gunpowder. The Teii had said that Wilson would receive no protection from them. Feltus and Brudenell, promising to be quick and stay alert, set out in the boat with four seamen and three muskets. On the final day at Nooaheevah, they wanted revenge on Wilson.
Gamble stayed in his cabin, in agony and fever from his gunshot wound; he had acting Midshipman Clapp stand on deck and scan the beach. At half past noon, Clapp shouted that the boat was in the surf with a crowd of natives. Gamble hobbled up the hatchway and had Clapp and two seamen take him to the Hammond, whose guns were intact. On their way, Clapp spied a wild scene: some of the natives were in the boat, and many more were plundering the goods. From the Hammond, Gamble fired deadly grapeshot and had just ordered a second round when two white men appeared in the surf, waving in distress, then plunging in. Clapp and the two seamen jumped into their leaky boat and began rowing for the shore. As they did, three Enana canoes turned their prows toward the Hammond. Alone on deck, Gamble loaded the cannon and fired away, driving back the canoes and giving cover to the rescue boat. Clapp and his men pulled out the swimmers, Coddington and Worth, and returned to the ship. Coddington was bleeding at the ears from a fractured skull. Worth, with a broken leg, said that there had been a massacre—Feltus, Brudenell, and the sailors Thomas Gibbs and John Thomas were dead. George Ross, barricaded at his trading house, might also have been killed.
Gamble was devastated. It had not been necessary to make the last trip, and he should not have allowed it. He had lost three more men, and he had lost Will Feltus, whom he loved like a brother. He hobbled back to the guns and kept firing at Porter’s island, at the burning village and at the fort, where the flag still flew over Massachusetts Bay and where Wilson could be seen directing the Enana to unspike the cannon. Worth somehow got aloft and bent on sails until the sun went down. Finally, Gamble ordered that Pettenger be brought from the Greenwich and that she be set on fire.
