The British blockade, military and commercial, the coastwise operations of their navy, and the careers of American cruisers directed to the destruction of British commerce, are then the three heads under which the ocean activities of 1813 divide. Although this chapter is devoted to the first two of these subjects, brief mention should be made here of the distant cruises of two American vessels, because, while detached from any connection with other events, they are closely linked, in time and place, with the disastrous seaboard engagement between the "Chesapeake" and "Shannon," with which the account of sea-coast maritime operations opens. On April 30 Captain John Rodgers put to sea from Boston in the frigate "President," accompanied by the frigate "Congress," Captain John Smith. Head winds immediately after sailing detained them inside of Cape Cod until May 3, and it was not till near George's Bank that any of the blockading squadron was seen. As, by the Admiralty's instructions, one of the blockaders was usually a ship of the line, the American vessels very properly evaded them. The two continued together until May 8, when they separated, some six hundred miles east of Delaware Bay. Rodgers kept along northward to the Banks of Newfoundland, hoping, at that junction of commercial highways, to fall in with a West India convoy, or vessels bound into Halifax or the St. Lawrence. Nothing, however, was seen, and he thence steered to the Azores with equal bad fortune. Obtaining thereabouts information of a homeward-bound convoy from the West Indies, he went in pursuit to the northeast, but failed to find it. Not till June 9 did he make three captures, in quick succession. Being then two thirds of the way to the English Channel, he determined to try the North Sea, shaping his course to intercept vessels bound either by the north or south of Ireland. Not a sail was met until the Shetland Islands were reached, and there were found only Danes, which, though Denmark was in hostility with Great Britain, were trading under British licenses. The "President" remained in the North Sea until the end of July, but made only two prizes, although she lay in wait for convoys of whose sailing accounts were received. Having renewed her supply of water at Bergen, in Norway, she returned to the Atlantic, made three captures off the north coast of Ireland, and thence beat back to the Banks, where two stray homeward-bound West Indiamen were at last caught. From there the ship made her way, still with a constant head wind, to Nantucket, off which was captured a British man-of-war schooner, tender to the admiral. On September 27 she anchored in Narragansett Bay, having been absent almost five months, and made twelve prizes, few of which were valuable. One, however, was a mail packet to Halifax, the capture of which, as of its predecessors, was noted by Prevost.[129]
The "Congress" was still less successful in material result. She followed a course which had hitherto been a favorite with American captains, and which Rodgers had suggested as alternative to his own; southeast, passing near the Cape Verde Islands, to the equator between longitudes 24° and 31° west; thence to the coast of Brazil, and so home, by a route which carried her well clear of the West India Islands. She entered Portsmouth, New Hampshire, December 14, having spent seven months making this wide sweep; in the course of which three prizes only were taken.[130] It will be remembered that the "Chesapeake," which had returned only a month before the "Congress" sailed, had taken much the same direction with similar slight result.
These cruises were primarily commerce-destroying, and were pursued in that spirit, although with the full purpose of fighting should occasion arise. The paucity of result is doubtless to be attributed to the prey being sought chiefly on the high seas, too far away from the points of arrival and departure. The convoy system, rigidly enforced, as captured British correspondence shows, cleared the seas of British vessels, except in the spots where they were found congested, concentrated, by the operation of the system itself. It may be noted that the experience of all these vessels showed that nowhere was the system so rigidly operative as in the West Indies and Western Atlantic. Doubtless, too, the naval officers in command took pains to guide the droves of vessels entrusted to them over unusual courses, with a view to elude pursuers. As the home port was neared, the common disposition to relax tension of effort as the moment of relief draws nigh, co-operated with the gradual drawing together of convoys from all parts of the world to make the approaches to the English Channel the most probable scene of success for the pursuer. There the greatest number were to be found, and there presumption of safety tended to decrease carefulness. This was to be amply proved by subsequent experience. It had been predicted by Rodgers himself, although he apparently did not think wise to hazard in such close quarters so fine and large a frigate as the "President." "It is very generally believed," he had written, "that the coasts of England, Ireland, and Scotland are always swarming with British men of war, and that their commerce would be found amply protected. This, however, I well know by experience, in my voyages when a youth, to be incorrect; and that it has always been their policy to keep their enemies as far distant from their shores as possible, by stationing their ships at the commencement of a war on the enemy's coasts, and in such other distant situations, ... and thereby be enabled to protect their own commerce in a twofold degree. This, however, they have been enabled to do, owing as well to the inactivity of the enemy, as to the local advantages derived from their relative situations."[131]
The same tendency was observable at other points of arrival, and recognition of this dictated the instructions issued to Captain Lawrence for the cruise of the "Chesapeake," frustrated through her capture by the "Shannon." Lawrence was appointed to the ship on May 6; the sailing orders issued to Captain Evans being transferred to him on that date. He was to go to the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, seeking there to intercept the military store-ships, and transports with troops, destined to Quebec and Upper Canada. "The enemy," wrote the Secretary, "will not in all probability anticipate our taking this ground with our public ships of war; and as his convoys generally separate between Cape Race and Halifax, leaving the trade of the St. Lawrence to proceed without convoy, the chance of captures upon an extensive scale is very flattering." He added the just remark, that "it is impossible to conceive a naval service of a higher order in a national point of view than the destruction of the enemy's vessels, with supplies for his army in Canada and his fleets on this station."[132]
Lawrence took command of the "Chesapeake" at Boston on May 20. The ship had returned from her last cruise April 9, and had been so far prepared for sea by her former commander that, as has been seen, her sailing orders were issued May 6. It would appear from the statement of the British naval historian James,[133] based upon a paper captured in the ship, that the enlistments of her crew expired in April. Although there were many reshipments, and a nucleus of naval seamen, there was a large infusion of new and untrained men, amounting to a reconstitution of the ship's company. More important still was the fact that both the captain and first lieutenant were just appointed; her former first lying fatally ill at the time she sailed. The third and fourth lieutenants were also strange to her, and in a manner to their positions; being in fact midshipmen, to whom acting appointments as lieutenants were issued at Lawrence's request, by Commodore Bainbridge of the navy yard, on May 27, five days before the action. The third took charge of his division for the first time the day of the battle, and the men were personally unknown to him. The first lieutenant himself was extremely young.
The bearing of these facts is not to excuse the defeat, but to enforce the lesson that a grave military enterprise is not to be hazarded on a side issue, or on a point of pride, without adequate preparation. The "Chesapeake" was ordered to a service of very particular importance at the moment—May, 1813—when the Canada campaign was about to open. She was to act against the communications of the enemy; and while it is upon the whole more expedient, for the morale of a service, that battle with an equal should not be declined, quite as necessarily action should not be sought when it will materially interfere with the discharge of a duty intrinsically of greater consequence. The capture of a single enemy's frigate is not to be confounded with, or inflated to, that destruction of an enemy's organized force which is the prime object of all military effort. Indeed, the very purpose to which the "Chesapeake" was designated was to cripple the organized force of the British, either the army in Canada, or the navy on the lakes. The chance of a disabling blow by unexpected action in the St. Lawrence much exceeded any gain to be anticipated, even by a victorious ship duel, which would not improbably entail return to port to refit; while officers new to their duties, and unknown to their men, detracted greatly from the chances of success, should momentary disaster or confusion occur.
The blockade of Boston Harbor at this moment was conducted by Captain Philip Vere Broke of the "Shannon", a 38-gun frigate, which he had then commanded for seven years. 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, then drawing towards its close; but after Trafalgar Napoleon's policy, while steadily directed towards increasing the number of his ships, had more and more tended to husbanding them against a future occasion, which in the end never came. The result was a great diminution in naval combats. Hence, the outbreak of the American war, followed by three frigate actions in rapid succession, opened out a new prospect, which was none the less stimulative because of the British reverses suffered. Captain Broke was justly confident in his own leadership and in the efficiency of a ship's company, which, whatever individual changes it may have undergone, had retained its identity of organization through so many years of his personal and energetic supervision. He now reasonably hoped to demonstrate what could be done by officers and men so carefully trained. Captain Pechell of the "Santo Domingo," the flagship on the American station, wrote: "The 'Shannon's' men were better trained, and understood gunnery better, than any men I ever saw;" nevertheless, he added, "In the action with the 'Chesapeake' the guns were all laid by Captain Broke's directions, consequently the fire was all thrown in one horizontal line, not a shot going over the 'Chesapeake.'"[134]
The escape of the "President" and "Congress" early in May, while the "Shannon" and her consort, the "Tenedos," were temporarily off shore in consequence of easterly weather, put Broke still more upon his mettle; and, fearing a similar mishap with the "Chesapeake," he sent Lawrence a challenge.[135] It has been said, by both Americans and English, that this letter was a model of courtesy. Undoubtedly it was in all respects such as a gentleman might write; but the courtesy was that of the French duellist, nervously anxious lest he should misplace an accent in the name of the man whom he intended to force into fight, and to kill. It was provocative to the last degree, which, for the end in view, it was probably meant to be. In it Broke showed himself as adroit with his pen—the adroitness of Canning—as he was to prove himself in battle. Not to speak of other points of irritation, the underlining of the words, "even combat," involved an imputation, none the less stinging because founded in truth, upon the previous frigate actions, and upon Lawrence's own capture of the "Peacock." In guns, the "Chesapeake" and "Shannon" were practically of equal force; but in the engagement the American frigate carried fifty more men than her adversary. To an invitation couched as was Broke's Lawrence was doubly vulnerable, for only six months had elapsed since he himself had sent a challenge to the "Bonne Citoyenne." With his temperament he could scarcely have resisted the innuendo, had he received the letter; but this he did not. It passed him on the way out and was delivered to Bainbridge, by whom it was forwarded to the Navy Department.
