Mad for Glory

by Robert Booth

  He came away feeling that the South American provinces were likely to separate from Spain but not to form republican governments, largely because of the outsized influence of the self-interested upper classes, with their bitter rivalries and their inveterate recourse to military force as a means of governing or changing governments. It gave him a profound respect for the unique qualities of the American revolution of 1775–83 and the remarkable process by which an eight-year war of independence had united the colonies and produced a new country.

  It was, evidently, as impossible to adapt the American republican model to the rebellions of Spanish America as it was pointless to have imposed annexation on the people of Nukuhiva. Neither nation-building nor imperialism, as undertaken by two Americans in 1814, had led to reasonable outcomes.

  Although ruling every sea, England was not quite ready to celebrate its takeover of the planet, for Napoleon escaped from his exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba and raised a huge army. This forced London to resume the costly role of savior of Europe in addition to fighting an unwanted land war in North America. The United States would be the best postwar market for Britain’s industries, and London wanted to stop killing and start selling. The defeats at Baltimore and on Lake Champlain convinced the king’s ministers to push their negotiators, and the Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814 to close out an Anglo-American conflict that had, in general, made prophets of its detractors.

  The Battle of New Orleans, fought in January 1815 before news of the treaty reached Louisiana, was won by Andrew Jackson’s superior artillery and was by far the biggest American victory of the entire war. Conveniently, it gave everyone a chance to celebrate and to congratulate President Madison, living in a boarding house, for having led them to triumph. London, too, celebrated the end of the brief American conflict and the final defeat of Napoleon, whose army was crushed by Wellington’s allied forces at Waterloo. In mid-June 1815, the terrible world war, after twenty-one years and millions of deaths, was finally over.

  Earlier, Madison had identified British interference with American shipping as the primary cause for war. That practice, a consequence of the Anglo-French conflict, vanished from postwar seas. America’s maritime commerce resumed trading in most old markets and several new ones, especially in Brazil. Nantucket and New Bedford led the world in whaling, and foreign trade thrived until the worldwide depression of 1818. On the frontiers of America, where the Indians had been minimally supplied by the British, white expansion continued as if the war had never ended. Canada came away a winner, its borders intact.

  The war had produced epochal consequences, mostly unintended, in the United States. Cut off from the usual supplies of overseas fabrics, American entrepreneurs had launched a homegrown textile industry that would proliferate under the protection of the 1816 tariff. The Federalist Party was disgraced and destroyed. In a country that had created the necessity of fending off a powerful invader, the party’s consistent anti-war position was ultimately fatal. Finally, the war, in all its madness, bloodshed, improvisation, and heroism, served to give the United States, formerly a plural collection of regions and states, a patriotic new identity as one nation, indivisible.

  Of all the vessels that had gone whaling in the Pacific, and all that Porter had captured, only the 370-ton Seringapatam pursued a westward course across that ocean. On May 7, 1814, the fourteen Englishmen who put Gamble and company in a leaky boat made off with the ship.

  First they stopped at Tahiti, where the nature of their brief adventures may be imagined. Then they sailed a long leg south and west to New South Wales (Australia), arriving at Port Jackson with many colorful stories to tell. No one really believed them, but an agent helped them claim salvage rights at the Admiralty Court in Sydney, which passed the buck to London. It happened that Captain Eber Bunker, fifty-three, “the father of South Seas whaling,” was ashore just then and could be persuaded to sail for England with this rum crew. Formerly a resident of Nantucket, Bunker had been sailing London whalers for the Enderbys since the 1780s and had been among the first to transport British convicts to the new colony at Botany Bay, Australia. In 1791, he had led the inaugural whaling expedition in Australian waters, followed by some sealing at New Zealand. He had just begun an ambitious sheep-ranching operation when the governor asked him to take command of the suspicious vessel.

  Captain Bunker sailed Seringapatam into the Indian Ocean, then west to the Cape of Good Hope, and then up the coast of Africa and on past Spain, Portugal, and France. Upon boarding a pilot to bring her up the English Channel, he learned that the great war had ended and that they were all under a Pax Britannica. He delivered her to the Admiralty authorities, who arranged for the long-missing vessel to be sold back to her smiling owners, a firm of British merchants who had eagerly reopened a lucrative commerce with the postwar world.

  David Porter began a new manic phase. By January 1815, he had published the first war story ever written by an American officer and was distributing copies of his two-volume Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean to friends and influentials, starting with President Madison. Sales were slow. Not everyone wanted to read about a war that had not gone well, and some were made uneasy by the allegory of a runaway ship with a loyal crew trapped on board, month after month, season after season, following the leader toward some conclusion that might prove disastrous.

  In the White House and in the state and navy departments, readers must have fixed on some of the more disturbing issues raised by a navy captain acting like a self-serving renegade. For more than a year, Porter had divorced himself from the larger aims of the United States in its war effort and its relations with the Pacific world, aims that had been so well represented by Consul Poinsett. No doubt these matters came up for animated discussion within the U.S. Navy officer corps as well.

  In written criticism, Porter was faulted chiefly for his boasting and his candor, if not rawness, and for his monstrous brutality in dealing with the Taipi. Americans of the book-buying class welcomed a bit of titillation, but not orgies and slaughter. Porter’s memoir was unique and provocative in showing the American war spirit in action. Decatur or Bainbridge, knights of the sea, would have written of their adventures with much greater refinement, but a truthful account of the actions and attitudes of Andrew Jackson, for example, would have ripped away the complacency of the American gentry and made Porter seem tame. Some did see the book as a revelation, and not a good one. They had assumed that officers were adhering to a code of humane and gentlemanly honor through the temptations and ambiguities of wartime, immune to the violence, lust, and bigotry that Porter exemplified.

  Porter was also faulted for his style, “strongly marked with a kind of bombastic verbosity, alike disgraceful to the hero and the man of education.” One Philadelphian opined that, “interesting as that journal is, it is surely disgraced by invidious comparisons and by calculations which will hardly bear the test of truth”—to say nothing of the “reprehensible” “mistaken pride” that had led him to destroy the Taipi homeland. No one cited Porter’s total absence of warmth toward others, his obvious alienation from his own mental-emotional life, his lack of religiosity, and his incapacity for reflection, moral struggle, or insight.

  Porter, at least, was honest about who he was and what he had done. If his behavior, as described in his book, did not comport with genteel expectations, it was because most serious readers came from a privileged class that had little understanding of the rough forces that were carrying America forward onto the frontier, into industrial manufacturing, and over the seas. They had not stood on the deck of a trading vessel as a friend was shot while repelling a British boarding party, nor had they returned from a day of squirrel hunting to find the corpses of scalped parents and siblings. Extraordinary violence saturated the lives of many ordinary Americans, as did enslavement, poverty, illness, and ignorance, but these things were not addressed in Congress or even discussed in taverns. And the war itself, the pervasive reality o
f war, added a new and darker layer to the whole, affecting the entire culture and not just those engaged in the constant violence of carrying it out.

  His admirers generally agreed that Captain Porter had produced a well-illustrated book full of thrilling material that needed better editing. At the North American Review, Boston’s foremost intellectual publication, the reviewer quoted copiously from Porter’s work and praised his depiction of the “uncivilized state of mankind” in the Pacific. He appreciated the explanation of tapu and the engraving of Mouina, “a very fine figure most curiously tattooed. The beauty and fancy of the lines and ornaments are very striking . . . .” The reviewer ignored “the conflicts with some of the tribes” except to say that the fight with the Hapa’a was “perhaps justified,” but the war with the Taipi was “a great errour of judgment.”

  The reviewer wrote that “a striking feature in the composition of this journal is the frankness with which it [is] written. The author has narrated everything, and, as he has not disguised anything that others would have suppressed, he has laid himself open to those who are disposed to judge him harshly.” Porter had written as a warrior who dealt in hard truths of real experience, on the edge of violence and death, without resorting to fiction or finessing the shameful parts.

  Captain Porter did not need a best-seller. In the spring of 1815 he was appointed one of the three members of the Board of Navy Commissioners—a board that had not existed before and that would, at last, put navy men in positions of authority at the Navy Department. Porter celebrated by hiring his old friend, the writer James K. Paulding, as secretary to the board, and then he opened fire on the new secretary of the navy, Benjamin W. Crowninshield, a merchant and former shipmaster from Salem. One of the largest wartime lenders to the federal government and the primary owner of the nation’s most successful privateer, the 600-ton battleship America, Crowninshield had no intention of being torpedoed by Captain Porter and his friends, and he took his case to the president. After a while, Madison had to tell the board members that they were not there to run the navy, but to advise its secretary.

  Although it did not pay well, sitting on the Board of Navy Commissioners was a high honor, and Porter had finally made enough money from government settlements that he could afford to purchase a fine 157-acre tract near the White House. There he built his own mansion looking down on the president’s. At “Meridian Hill,” he became a lion of Washington and hosted grand soirees, although he and Evelina did not get along. Captain Porter turned into Farmer Porter, on the model of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and engaged in agriculture of the most advanced scientific sort, which made his hillsides a kind of spectacle of experimentation that attracted the skeptical public as well as audiences of astonished farmers and hustling real-estate men.

  Most of his innovations were as expensive as they were unproductive, which forced him to take out enormous loans. How would he repay them? The answer, as before, was for the navy to send him to the Pacific. He would lead a squadron to Japan, an island nation that everyone had heard about but very few had visited. It was an interesting idea, but Navy Secretary Crowninshield did not see Porter as quite the right man for the job, and the proposal was shelved.

  With no Japan in his future, Porter thought about the world he had seen, and where it was that he might make himself useful and rich. The more he considered it, the more he wondered if he had not missed a great opportunity on the coast of Chile.

  *John Glover Cowell’s father-in-law, Captain Joseph Lindsey, forty-six, served as sailing master on board the schooner Ticonderoga in the battle and was cited for “coolness, skill, and bravery.”

  *Bartolome de Las Casas was a conquistador in Central America who had a revelation and became an advocate for the peaceful and respectful treatment of native peoples.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Minute Guns

  José Miguel Carrera, tall, confident, and handsome, came ashore in America after a sixty-three-day voyage, arriving at Annapolis, Maryland, in mid-January 1816. Navy Commissioner Porter set up a lengthy interview with Secretary of State James Monroe and an informal audience with President Madison, who had recently forbidden the export of arms and ammunition to South America. Neither made commitments, but both were impressed. It was a good start, and it got better.

  The newspapers tracked the travels of the charismatic hero of Chile as he went here and there, addressing patriotic societies and military men, impressing them with his genial dignity and arousing an interest in Chile and the importance of an independent republic. In private, to potential investors, President Carrera laid out the plan for winning back his country with a naval squadron, a corps of officers, and military supplies for a people’s army. To invest in his nation-building program was to help secure the future of the United States in the Pacific and Spanish America, with a high return on investment and prompt repayment projected from the sale of Chilean government bonds and duties on foreign commerce.

  Roberts Poinsett did not meet with Carrera until July 1816, in New York. Poinsett was a changed man. His idealism had not survived his experiences in Spanish America and his missed opportunity to serve stateside in time of war. The news of Osorio’s re-conquest had depressed and embittered him, and he had little hope that Carrera, now on the outside, could unite Chile’s factions and restart the movement. Observing the realities of the postwar United States, he had come to appreciate its pragmatic politics and its lack of interest in the affairs of other nations or regions. In 1815, the government had recognized Fernando VII as king of Spain, and Secretary of State Monroe—soon to become president—had to dismiss any thought of recognizing Chilean independence, let alone committing to military intervention.

  Denied other opportunities, Poinsett had begun a political career in his home state of South Carolina. He would do no more for Chile unless the federal government adopted a formal policy of “emancipation of the colonies” and authorized him to intervene, preferably as general of an invading army. He was weary from his years in the field and planned to make a grand tour of the American West that summer, including a meeting in Kentucky with House Speaker Henry Clay, expert in South American affairs and partial to Juan Martin Puerryedon, the ruthless French-Irish governor of Argentina, and Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile. Poinsett, bucking for preferment, opined to Clay that O’Higgins’s love of the English had been exaggerated and that he was, in fact, a better republican than Carrera. True, Carrera possessed “more intellect and more vigour of character” and might be the only person “capable of carrying the revolution to a successful termination,” but his republicanism was mainly “due to my ascendant over him, and I found on that subject he was difficult to govern.” By contrast, O’Higgins was “a well-disposed man” whom “a skillful agent can render subservient to all his views.” As for Carrera’s mission to America, Poinsett was willing to introduce the Chilean leader to some expatriate military officers who had served Napoleon, and to arrange with a Philadelphia merchant house to provide munitions. That was it: Poinsett would keep in touch with Porter and would advise Carrera when he could.

  Carrera often stayed with the ever-growing Porter family at Meridian Hill. Porter saw a chance for big money in Chile, and considered heading up its navy. He helped his guest learn to speak English fluently so as to impress congressmen, senators, and potential investors. In Baltimore, Porter’s hometown, there was great interest in the potential of South America. Many of its swells had made their fortunes in wartime Caribbean privateering and had a strong desire to continue to make money in that direction. Porter’s friend John S. Skinner, a Baltimore newspaper publisher, admired Carrera and agreed to lend him large sums at high rates. Another Porter connection, Baptis Irvine, “a fanatic of liberty” and New York editor-publisher, opened doors to merchants and reformers who liked the idea of a free Chile, or at least of supplying the armies. In his writings and promotions, Irvine countered Clay by promoting Carrera as the true George Washington of Chile.

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  José Miguel Carrera’s American tour went on too long, as Porter and his connections slowly assembled money, men, and materials. Shortly after Thanksgiving, at the end of eleven months of speech-giving and deal-making, Carrera was ready to begin his own fateful cruise to the Pacific. With many of his new friends and investors, he stood on a wharf in New York and surveyed his fleet: the twenty-eight-gun sloop of war Clifton and the schooner and brigs Davey, Adeline, and Patriot, with full crews, forty soldiers, thirty officers, a couple of printing presses, and a dozen teachers and artisans, together with enough weapons, ammunition, and uniforms to equip an army. It was December 5, 1816, and time to begin the liberation of Chile.

  Bound for Valparaiso, the squadron first put in at Buenos Aires to acquire provisions and take on troops. On February 22, George Washington’s birthday, a band on the Clifton struck up martial music and each ship fired a national salute, returned thunderously by the port’s batteries. At Baxter’s Hotel, Americans dined and drank to the memory of their first president, concluding with a toast from Carrera—“The generous North Americans, to whom this country is in gratitude eternally bound”—to which all glasses were raised “to General Carrera: Under his auspices may the Chilean flag wave in triumph over that of Old Spain!”

  Even then, Carrera knew that his tricolor flag might never wave again. José de San Martin’s Argentine army, with a division under O’Higgins aided by one other Chilean officer, had already departed to engage the royalists in Chile. If the Argentines won, Carrera would have no cause and no country. By early February, San Martin’s Army of the Andes had descended from the summits and begun skirmishing with the Spanish-Peruvians of the new captain-general of Chile, Casimiro Marco. On February 12, outside the town of Chacabuco, O’Higgins showed San Martin an ideal salient and wished to begin the battle with his vanguard. San Martin objected, but O’Higgins moved out with his men and smashed into Marco’s army with irresistible force. Before San Martin had fully deployed the rest of his troops, the enemy was on the run, and the battle was over. A day later, the Army of the Andes entered Santiago in triumph, and San Martin made O’Higgins the new supreme director of Chile. The royalists crowded onto ships at Valparaiso and escaped to Callao, and San Martin started overland for Buenos Aires to recruit forces for an invasion of Peru. Neither he nor O’Higgins realized that in the south of Chile, where the royalists remained strong, General Mariano Osorio had an army of 5,000 soldiers and was marching toward Santiago.