"DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP!"
The second year of the war by sea opened brilliantly enough to satisfy the American people, who were now in a mood to expect too much of their navy. In February the story of the Wasp and the Frolic was repeated by two ships of precisely the same class. The American sloop-of-war Hornet had sailed to South America with the Constitution and was detached to blockade, in the port of Bahia, the British naval sloop Bonne Citoyenne, which contained treasure to the amount of half a million pounds in specie. Captain James Lawrence of the Hornet sent in a challenge to fight, ship against ship, pledging his word that the Constitution would not interfere, but the British commander, perhaps mindful of his precious cargo, declined the invitation. Instead of this, he sensibly sent word to a great seventy-four at Rio de Janeiro, begging her to come and drive the pestiferous Hornet away.
The British battleship arrived so suddenly that Captain Lawrence was compelled to dodge and flee in the darkness. By a close shave he gained the open sea and made off up the coast. For several weeks the Hornet idled to and fro, vainly seeking merchant prizes, and then off the Demerara River on February 24, 1813, she fell in with the British brig Peacock, that flew the royal ensign. The affair lasted no more than fifteen minutes. The Peacock was famous for shining brass work, spotless paint, and the immaculate trimness of a yacht, but her gunnery had been neglected, for which reason she went to the bottom in six fathoms of water with shot-holes in her hull and thirty-seven of her crew put out of action. The sting of the Hornet had been prompt and fatal. Captain Lawrence had only one man killed and two wounded, and his ship was as good as ever. Crowding his prisoners on board and being short of provisions and water, he set sail for a home port and anchored in New York harbor. He was in time to share with Bainbridge the carnival of salutes, processions, dinners, addresses of congratulation, votes of thanks, swords, medals, prize money, promotion—every possible tribute of an adoring and grateful people.
One of the awards bestowed upon Lawrence was the command of the frigate Chesapeake. Among seamen she was rated an unlucky ship, and Lawrence was confidently expected to break the spell. Her old crew had left her after the latest voyage, which met with no success, and other sailors were reluctant to join her. Privateering had attracted many of them, and the navy was finding it difficult to recruit the kind of men it desired. Lawrence was compelled to sign on a scratch lot, some Portuguese, a few British, and many landlubbers. Given time to shake them together in hard service at sea, he would have made a smart crew of them no doubt, as Isaac Hull had done in five weeks with the men of the Constitution, but destiny ordered otherwise.
In the spring of 1813 the harbor of Boston was blockaded by the thirty-eight-gun British frigate Shannon, Captain Philip Vere Broke, who had been in this ship for seven years. In the opinion of Captain Mahan, "his was one of those cases where singular merit as an officer and an attention to duty altogether exceptional had not yet obtained opportunity for distinction. It would probably be safe to say that no more thoroughly efficient ship of her class had been seen in the British navy during the twenty years' war with France."
Captain Broke was justly confident in his own leadership and in the efficiency of a ship's company, which had retained its identity of organization through so many years of his personal and energetic supervision. Indeed, the captain of the British flagship on the American station wrote: "The Shannon's men were trained and understood gunnery better than any men I ever saw." Every morning the men were exercised at training the guns and in the afternoon in the use of the broadsword, musket, and pike. Twice each week the crew fired at targets with great guns and musketry and the sailor who hit the bull's eye received a pound of tobacco. Without warning Captain Broke would order a cask tossed overboard and then suddenly order some particular gun to sink it. In brief, the Shannon possessed those qualities which had been notable in the victorious American frigates and which were lamentably deficient in the Chesapeake.
Lawrence's men were unknown to each other and to their officers, and they had never been to sea together. The last draft came aboard, in fact, just as the anchor was weighed and the Chesapeake stood out to meet her doom. Even most of her officers were new to the ship. They had no chance whatever to train or handle the rabble between decks. Now Captain Broke had been anxious to fight this American frigate as matching the Shannon in size and power. He had already addressed to Captain Lawrence a challenge whose wording was a model of courtesy but which was provocative to the last degree. A sailor of Lawrence's heroic temper was unlikely to avoid such a combat, stimulated as he was by the unbroken success of his own navy in duels between frigates.
On the first day of June, Captain Broke boldly ran into Boston harbor and broke out his flag in defiance of the Chesapeake which was riding at anchor as though waiting to go to sea. Instantly accepting the invitation, Captain Lawrence hoisted colors, fired a gun, and mustered his crew. In this ceremonious fashion, as gentlemen were wont to meet with pistols to dispute some point of honor, did the Chesapeake sail out to fight the waiting Shannon. The news spread fast and wide and thousands of people, as though they were bound to the theater, hastened to the heights of Malden, to Nahant, and to the headlands of Salem and Marblehead, in hopes of witnessing this famous sight. They assumed that victory was inevitable. Any other surmise was preposterous.
These eager crowds were cheated of the spectacle, however, for the Chesapeake bore away to the eastward after rounding Boston Light and dropped hull down until her sails were lost in the summer haze, with the Shannon in her company as if they steered for some rendezvous. They were firing when last seen and the wind bore the echo of the guns, faint and far away. It was most extraordinary that three weeks passed before the people would believe the tidings of the disaster. A pilot who had left the Chesapeake at five o'clock in the afternoon reported that he was still near enough an hour later to see the two ships locked side by side, that a fearful explosion had happened aboard the Chesapeake, and that through a rift in the battle smoke he had beheld the British flag flying above the American frigate.
This report was confirmed by a fishing boat from Cape Ann and by the passengers in a coastwise packet, but the public doubted and still hoped until the newspapers came from Halifax with an account of the arrival of the Chesapeake as prize to the Shannon and of the funeral honors paid to the body of Captain James Lawrence. The tragic defeat came at an extremely dark moment of the war when almost every expectation had been disappointed and the future was clouded. Richard Rush, the American diplomatist, wrote, recalling the event:
I remember—what American does not!—the first rumor of it. I remember the startling sensation. I remember at first the universal incredulity. I remember how the post-offices were thronged for successive days by anxious thousands; how collections of citizens rode out for miles on the highway, accosting the mail to catch something by anticipation. At last, when the certainty was known, I remember the public gloom; funeral orations and badges of mourning bespoke it. "Don't give up the ship"—the dying words of Lawrence—were on every tongue.
It was learned that the Chesapeake had followed the Shannon until five o'clock, when the latter luffed and showed her readiness to begin fighting. Lawrence was given the choice of position, with a westerly breeze, but he threw away this advantage, preferring to trust to his guns with a green crew rather than the complex and delicate business of maneuvering his ship under sail. He came bowling straight down at the Shannon, luffed in his turn, and engaged her at a distance of fifty yards. The breeze was strong and the nimble American frigate forged ahead more rapidly than Lawrence expected, so that presently her broadside guns had ceased to bear.
While Lawrence was trying to slacken headway and regain the desired position, the enemy's shot disabled his headsails, and the Chesapeake came up into the wind with canvas all a-flutter. It was a mishap which a crew of trained seamen might have quickly mended, but the frigate was taken aback—that is, the breeze drove her stern foremost toward the Shannon and exposed her to a deadly cannonade which the American gunners were unable to return. The hope of salvation lay in getting the ship under way again or in boarding the Shannon. It was in this moment that the battle was won and lost, for every gun of the British broadside was sweeping the American deck diagonally from stern to bow, while the marines in the tops of the Shannon picked off the officers and seamen of the Chesapeake, riddling them with musket balls. It was like the swift blast of a hurricane. Lawrence fell, mortally wounded. Ludlow, his first lieutenant, was carried below. The second lieutenant was stationed between decks, and the third forsook his post to assist those who were carrying Lawrence below to the gun deck. Not an officer remained on the spar deck and not a living man was left on the quarter deck when the Chesapeake drifted against the Shannon after four minutes of this infernal destruction. As the ships collided, Captain Broke dashed forward and shouted for boarders, leading them across to the American deck. No more than fifty men followed him and three hundred Yankee sailors should have been able to wipe the party out, but most of the Chesapeake crew were below, and, demoralized by lack of discipline and leadership, they refused to come up and stand the gaff. Brave resistance was made by the few who remained on deck and a dozen more followed the second lieutenant, George Budd, as he rushed up to rally a forlorn hope.
It was a desperate encounter while it lasted, and Captain Broke was slashed by a saber as he led a charge to clear the forecastle. Yet two minutes sufficed to clear the decks of the Chesapeake, and the few visible survivors were thrown down the hatchways. The guns ceased firing, and the crew below sent up a message of surrender. The frigates had drifted apart, leaving Broke and his seamen to fight without reinforcement, but before they came together again the day was won. This was the most humiliating phase of the episode, that a handful of British sailors and marines should have carried an American frigate by boarding.
It must not be inferred that the Chesapeake inflicted no damage during the fifteen minutes of this famous engagement. Thirty-seven of the British boarding party were killed or wounded and the American marines—"leather-necks" then and "devil-dogs" now—fought in accordance with the spirit of a corps which had won its first laurels in the Revolution. Such broadsides as the Chesapeake was able to deliver were accurately placed and inflicted heavy losses. The victory cost the Shannon eighty-two men killed and wounded, while the American frigate lost one hundred and forty-seven of her crew, or more than one-third of her complement. Even in defeat the Chesapeake had punished the enemy far more severely than the Constitution had been able to do.
Lawrence lay in the cockpit, or hospital, when his men began to swarm down in confusion and leaderless panic. Still conscious, he was aware that disaster had overtaken them and he muttered again and again with his dying breath, "Don't give up the ship. Blow her up." Thus passed to an honorable fame an American naval officer of great gallantry and personal charm. Although he brought upon his country a bitter humiliation, the fact that he died sword in hand, his last thought for his flag and his service, has atoned for his faults of rashness and overconfidence. The odds were against him, and ill-luck smashed his chance of overcoming them. He was no more disgraced than Dacres when he surrendered the Guerrière to a heavier ship, or than Lambert, dying on his own deck, when he saw the colors of the Java hauled down.
The Shannon took her prize to Halifax, and when the news came back that the captain of the Chesapeake lay dead in a British port, the bronzed sea-dogs of the Salem Marine Society resolved to fetch his body home in a manner befitting his end. Captain George Crowninshield obtained permission from the Government to sail with a flag of truce for Halifax, and he equipped the brig Henry for the sad and solemn mission. Her crew was picked from among the shipmasters of Salem, some of them privateering skippers, every man of them a proven deep-water commander. It was such a crew as never before or since took a vessel out of an American port. When they returned to Salem with the remains of Captain Lawrence and Lieutenant Ludlow, the storied old seaport saw their funeral column pass through the quiet and crowded streets. The pall-bearers bore names to thrill American hearts today—Hull, Stewart, Bainbridge, Blakely, Creighton, and Parker, all captains of the navy. A Salem newspaper described the ceremonies simply and with an unconscious pathos:
The day was unclouded, as if no incident should be wanting to crown the mind with melancholy and woe—the wind from the same direction and the sea presented the same unruffled surface as was exhibited to our anxious view when on that memorable first day of July we saw the immortal Lawrence proudly conducting his ship to action. . . . The brig Henry containing the precious relics lay at anchor in the harbor. They were placed in barges and, preceded by a long procession of boats filled with seamen uniformed in blue jackets and trousers, with a blue ribbon on their hats bearing the motto of "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," were rowed by minute strokes to the end of India Wharf, where the bearers were ready to receive the honored dead. From the time the boats left the brig until the bodies were landed, the United States brig Rattlesnake and the brig Henry alternately fired minute guns . . . On arriving at the meeting-house the coffins were placed in the centre of the church by the seamen who rowed them ashore and who stood during the ceremony leaning upon them in an attitude of mourning. The church was decorated with cypress and evergreen, and the names of Lawrence and Ludlow appeared in gilded letters on the front of the pulpit.
It was wholly reasonable that the exploit of the Shannon should arouse fervid enthusiasm in the breast of every Briton. The wounds inflicted by Hull, Decatur, and Bainbridge still rankled, but they were now forgotten and the loud British boastings equaled all the tales of Yankee brag. A member of Parliament declared that the "action which Broke fought with the Chesapeake was in every respect unexampled. It was not—and he knew it was a bold assertion which he made—to be surpassed by any other engagement which graced the naval annals of Great Britain." Admiral Warren was still in a peevish humor at the hard knocks inflicted on the Royal Navy when he wrote, in congratulating Captain Broke: "At this critical moment you could not have restored to the British naval service the preeminence it has always preserved, or contradicted in a more forcible manner the foul aspersions and calumnies of a conceited, boasting enemy than by the brilliant act you have performed. The relation of such an event restores the history of ancient times and will do more good to the service than it is possible to conceive."
Captain Broke was made a baronet and received other honors and awards which he handsomely deserved, but the wound he had suffered at the head of his boarding party disabled him for further sea duty. If the influence of the Constitution and the United States was far-reaching in improving the efficiency of the American navy, it can be said also that the victory of the Shannon taught the British service the value of rigorous attention to gunnery and a highly trained and disciplined personnel.
American chagrin was somewhat softened a few weeks later when two very small ships, the Enterprise and the Boxer, met in a spirited combat off the harbor of Portland, Maine, like two bantam cocks, and the Britisher was beaten in short order on September 5, 1813. The Enterprise had been a Yankee schooner in the war with Tripoli but had been subsequently altered to a square rig and had received more guns and men to worry the enemy's privateers. The brig-of-war was a kind of vessel heartily disliked by seamen and now vanished from blue water. The immortal Boatswain Chucks of Marryat proclaimed that "they would certainly damn their inventor to all eternity" and that "their common, low names, 'Pincher,' 'Thrasher,' 'Boxer,' 'Badger,' and all that sort, are quite good enough for them."
Commanding the Enterprise was Captain William Burrows, twenty-eight years old, who had seen only a month of active service in the war. Captain Samuel Blyth of the Boxer had worked his way up to this unimportant post after many years of arduous duty in the British navy. He might have declined a tussel with the Enterprise for his crew numbered only sixty-six men against a hundred and twenty, but he nailed his colors to the mainmast and remarked that they would never come down while there was any life in him.
The day was calm, the breeze fitful, and the little brigs drifted about each other until they lay within pistol shot. Then both loosed their broadsides, while the sailors shouted bravely, and both captains fell, Blyth killed instantly and Burrows mortally hurt but crying out that the flag must never be struck. There was no danger of this, for the Enterprise raked the British brig through and through until resistance was hopeless. Captain Blyth was as good as his word. He did not live to see his ensign torn down. Great hearts in little ships, these two captains were buried side by side in a churchyard which overlooks Casco Bay, and there you may read their epitaphs today.
The grim force of circumstances was beginning to alter the naval policy of the United States. Notwithstanding the dramatic successes, her flag was almost banished from the high seas by the close of the year 1813. The frigates Constellation, United States, and Macedonian were hemmed in port by the British blockade; the Adams and the Constitution were laid up for repairs; and the only formidable ships of war which roamed at large were the President, the Essex, and the Congress. The smaller vessels which had managed to slip seaward and which were of such immense value in destroying British commerce found that the system of convoying merchantmen in fleets of one hundred or two hundred sail had left the ocean almost bare of prizes. It was the habit of these convoys, however, to scatter as they neared their home ports, every skipper cracking on sail and the devil take the hindmost—a failing which has survived unto this day, and many a wrathful officer of an American cruiser or destroyer in the war against Germany could heartily echo the complaint of Nelson when he was a captain, "behaving as all convoys that ever I saw did, shamefully ill, and parting company every day."
This was the reason why American naval vessels and privateers left their own coasts and dared to rove in the English Channel, as Paul Jones had done in the Ranger a generation earlier. It was discovered that enemy merchantmen could be snapped up more easily within sight of their own shores than thousands of miles away. First to emphasize this fact in the War of 1812 was the naval brig Argus, Captain William H. Allen, which made a summer crossing and cruised for a month on end in the Irish Sea and in the chops of the Channel with a gorgeous recompense for her shameless audacity. England scolded herself red in the face while the saucy Argus captured twenty-seven ships and took her pick of their valuable cargoes. Her course could be traced by the blazing hulls that she left in her wake and this was how the British gun brig Pelican finally caught up with her.
Although the advantage of size and armament was with the Pelican, it was to be expected that the Argus would prove more than a match for her. The American commander, Captain Allen, had played a distinguished part in several of the most famous episodes of the navy. As third lieutenant of the Chesapeake, in 1807, he had picked up a live coal in the cook's galley, held it in his fingers, and so fired the only gun discharged against the Leopard in that inglorious surprise and surrender. As first officer of the frigate United States he received credit for the splendid gunnery which had overwhelmed the Macedonian, and he enjoyed the glory of bringing the prize to port. It was as a reward of merit that he was given command of the Argus. Alas, in this fight off the coast of Wales he lost both his ship and his life, and England had scored again. There was no ill-luck this time—nothing to plead in excuse. The American brig threw away a chance of victory because her shooting was amazingly bad, and instead of defending the deck with pistol, pike, and musket, when the boarders came over the bow the crew lowered the flag.
It was an early morning fight, on August 14, 1813, in which Captain Allen had his leg shot off within five minutes after the two brigs had engaged. He refused to be taken below, but loss of blood soon made him incapable of command, and presently his first lieutenant was stunned by a grapeshot which grazed his scalp. The ship was well sailed, however, and gained a position for raking the Pelican in deadly fashion, but the shot went wild and scarcely any harm was done. The British captain chose his own range and methodically made a wreck of the Argus in twenty minutes of smashing fire, working around her at will while not a gun returned his broadsides. Then he sheered close and was prepared to finish it on the deck of the Argus when she surrendered with twenty-three of her crew out of action. The Pelican was so little punished that only two men were killed. The officer left in command of the Argus laid this unhappy conclusion to "the superior size and metal of our opponent, and the fatigue which the crew underwent from a very rapid succession of prizes." There were those on board who blamed it to the casks of Oporto wine which had been taken out of the latest prize and which the sailors had secretly tapped. Honesty is the best policy, even in dealing with an enemy. The affair of the Argus and the Pelican was not calculated to inflate Yankee pride.
To balance this, however, came two brilliant actions by small ships. The new Peacock, named for the captured British brig, under Captain Lewis Warrington, stole past the blockade of New York. Off the Florida coast on the 29th of April she sighted a convoy and attacked the escort brig of eighteen guns, the Epervier. In this instance the behavior of the American vessel and her crew was supremely excellent and not a flaw could be found. They hulled the British brig forty-five times and made a shambles of her deck and did it with the loss of one man.
Even more sensational was the last cruise of the Wasp, Captain Johnston Blakely, which sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in May and roamed the English Channel to the dismay of all honest British merchantmen. The brig-of-war Reindeer endeavored to put an end to her career but nineteen minutes sufficed to finish an action in which the Wasp slaughtered half the British crew and thrice repelled boarders. This was no light task, for as Michael Scott, the British author of Tom Cringle's Log, candidly expressed it:
In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery deck of an enemy's vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against them . . . I don't like Americans. I never did and never shall like them. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth,—nor fight with them, were it not for the laurel to be acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one's steel as they have always proved.
Refitting in a French port, the dashing Blakely took the Wasp to sea again and encountered a convoy in charge of a huge, lumbering ship of the line. Nothing daunted, the Wasp flitted in among the timid merchant ships and snatched a valuable prize laden with guns and military stores. Attempting to bag another, she was chased away by the indignant seventy-four and winged it in search of other quarry until she sighted four strange sails. Three of them were British war brigs in hot pursuit of a Yankee privateer, and Johnston Blakely was delighted to play a hand in the game. He selected his opponent, which happened to be the Avon, and overtook her in the darkness of evening. Before a strong wind they foamed side by side, while the guns flashed crimson beneath the shadowy gleam of tall canvas. Thus they ran for an hour and a half, and then the Avon signaled that she was beaten, with five guns dismounted, forty-two men dead or wounded, seven feet of water in the hold, the magazine flooded, and the spars and rigging almost destroyed.
Blakely was about to send a crew aboard when another hostile brig, forsaking the agile Yankee privateer, came up to help the Avon. The Wasp was perfectly willing to take on this second adversary, but just then a third British ship loomed through the obscurity, and the ocean seemed a trifle overpopulated for safety. Blakely ran off before the wind, compelled to abandon his prize. The Avon, however, was so badly battered that she went to the bottom before the wounded seamen could be removed from her. Thence the Wasp went to Madeira and was later reported as spoken near the Cape Verde Islands, but after that she vanished from blue water, erased by some tragic fate whose mystery was never solved. To the port of missing ships she carried brave Blakely and his men after a meteoric career which had swept her from one victory to another.
Of the frigates, only three saw action during the last two years of the war, and of these the President and the Essex were compelled to strike to superior forces of the enemy. The Constitution was lucky enough to gain the open sea in December, 1814, and fought her farewell battle with the frigate Cyane and the sloop-of-war Levant on the 20th of February. In this fight Captain Charles Stewart showed himself a gallant successor to Hull and Bainbridge. Together the two British ships were stronger than the Constitution, but Stewart cleverly hammered the one and then the other and captured both. Honor was also due the plucky little Levant, which, instead of taking to her heels, stood by to assist her larger comrade like a terrier at the throat of a wolf. It is interesting to note that the captains, English and American, had received word that peace had been declared, but without official confirmation they preferred to ignore it. The spirit which lent to naval warfare the spirit of the duel was too strong to let the opportunity pass.
The President was a victim of a continually increased naval strength by means of which Great Britain was able to strangle the seafaring trade and commerce of the United States as the war drew toward its close. Captain Decatur, who had taken command of this frigate, remarked "the great apprehension and danger" which New York felt, in common with the entire seaboard, and the anxiety of the city government that the crew of the ship should remain for defense of the port. Coastwise navigation was almost wholly suspended, and thousands of sloops and schooners feared to undertake voyages to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston. Instead of these, canvas-covered wagons struggled over the poor highways in continuous streams between New England and the Southern coast towns. This awkward result of the blockade moved the sense of humor of the Yankee rhymsters who placarded the wagons with such mottoes as "Free Trade and Oxen's Rights" and parodied Ye Mariners of England with the lines:
Ye wagoners of Freedom
Whose chargers chew the cud,
Whose wheels have braved a dozen years
The gravel and the mud;
Your glorious hawbucks yoke again
To take another jag,
And scud through the mud
Where the heavy wheels do drag,
Where the wagon creak is long and low
And the jaded oxen lag.
Columbia needs no wooden walls,
No ships where billows swell;
Her march is like a terrapin's,
Her home is in her shell.
To guard her trade and sailor's rights,
In woods she spreads her flag.
Such ribald nonsense, however, was unfair to a navy which had done magnificently well until smothered and suppressed by sheer weight of numbers. It was in January, 1815, that Captain Decatur finally sailed out of New York harbor in the hope of taking the President past the blockading division which had been driven offshore by a heavy northeast gale. The British ships were struggling back to their stations when they spied the Yankee frigate off the southern coast of Long Island. It was a stern chase, Decatur with a hostile squadron at his heels and unable to turn and fight because the odds were hopeless. The frigate Endymion was faster than her consorts and, as she came up alone, the President delayed to exchange broadsides before fleeing again with every sail set. Her speed had been impaired by stranding as she came out past Sandy Hook, else she might have out-footed the enemy. But soon the Pomone and the Tenedos, frigates of the class of the Shannon and the Guerrière, were in the hunt. Decatur was cornered, but his guns were served until a fifth of the crew were disabled, the ship was crippled, and a force fourfold greater than his own was closing in to annihilate him at its leisure. "I deemed it my duty to surrender," said he, and a noble American frigate, more formidable than the Constitution, was added to the list of the Royal Navy.
A FRIGATE OF 1812 UNDER SAIL
The Constellation, of which this is a photograph, is somewhat smaller than the Constitution, being rated at 38 guns as against 44 for the latter. In general appearance, however, and particularly in rig, the two types are very similar. Although the Constellation did not herself see action in the War of 1812, she is a good example of the heavily armed American frigate of that day—and the only one of them still to be seen at sea under sail within recent years. At the present time the Constellation lies moored at the pier of the Naval Training Station, Newport, R.I.
Photograph by E. Müller, Jr., Inc., New York.