As far as the accounts[308] agree, the boats were twelve in number, with about two hundred men. The privateersmen numbered ninety. As the boats approached, the guns opened on them; and when they came alongside the privateer they found the boarding-nettings up, with a desperate crew behind. So vigorously did the British seamen attack, that they gained the forecastle for a time. All three American lieutenants were killed or disabled, and Captain Reid fought his brig alone; but the deck was at last cleared, and the surviving assailants dropped into their boats or into the water.
Proverbially, an unsuccessful boat-attack was the most fatal of all services. The British loss was excessive. According to their report at the time, “Lieutenants Bowerbank, Coswell, and Rogers of the ‘Rota’ were killed, as well as thirty-eight seamen, and eighty-three wounded; the first, fourth, and fifth lieutenants of the ‘Plantagenet’ were wounded, and twenty-two seamen killed, and twenty-four wounded.[309]” According to the official report, thirty-four were killed and eighty-six were wounded. The “Guerriere” in her battle with the “Constitution” lost only seventy-eight men altogether. The “Macedonian” lost only one hundred and four. The attack on the “General Armstrong” was one of the bloodiest defeats suffered by the British navy in the war. Not only was the privateer untaken, but she lost few of her crew,—nine in all, killed and wounded.
Captain Lloyd then declared that he would destroy the privateer if he had to destroy Fayal in doing it, and ordered Captain Bentham of the “Carnation” to attack her with his guns. Reid abandoned and scuttled the “General Armstrong,” taking his men on shore. The “Carnation’s” shot inflicted some injury on the town, before the privateer was set on fire by the “Carnation’s” boats.[310]
If the British navy cared to pay such a price for the shell of an old privateer brig, which had already cost British commerce, as Captain Lloyd believed, a million dollars,[311] the privateers were willing to gratify the wish, as was shown a few days afterward when the “Endymion” tried to carry the “Prince of Neufchatel” by boarding. This privateer had made itself peculiarly obnoxious to the British navy by the boldness of its ravages in British waters. It was coming to America filled with plunder, and with a prize in company, when off Gay Head the “Endymion” was sighted, October 11, and gave chase.
Captain Hope of the “Endymion” made an official report, explaining with much detail that he chased the privateer till evening, when the wind failed, and he then sent out his boats:[312]—
“I sent all the boats under command of Lieutenants Hawkins, Ormond, and Fanshaw. In approaching the ship an alarm was fired. The boats had been previously rowing up under a shoal, and had not felt the effects of a rapid tide which they almost instantaneously became exposed to. The second barge in taking the station assigned by Lieutenant Hawkins on the schooner’s starboard bow, having her larboard oars shot away, unfortunately was swept by the stream athwart the first barge; thereby all the boats became entangled; and it is with extreme concern I acquaint you that the attack was in consequence at this moment only partially made. Notwithstanding this disadvantage at the first onset, every exertion that human skill could devise was resorted to to renew the contest; and they succeeded in again getting alongside, but not in the position intended. Their failure, therefore, is to be ascribed in the first instance to the velocity of the tide, the height of the vessel’s side, not having channel plates to assist the men in getting on her deck, and her very superior force (a schooner of the largest dimensions, the ‘Prince of Neufchatel,’ three hundred and twenty tons, eighteen guns, long-nine and twelve-pounders, with a complement of one hundred and forty men of all nations, commanded by Mons. Jean Ordronaux). The boats’ painters being now shot away, they again fell astern without ever being able to repeat the attack, and with great difficulty regained the ship, with the exception of the second barge.”
Captain Ordronaux of the privateer had a crew of less than forty men then at quarters, and they suffered severely, only nine men escaping injury. The boarders gained the deck, but were killed as fast as they mounted; and at last more than half the British party were killed or captured. According to the British account, twenty-eight men, including the first lieutenant of the “Endymion,” were killed; and thirty-seven men, including the second lieutenant, were wounded.[313] This report did not quite agree with that of the privateer, which claimed also twenty-eight prisoners, including the second lieutenant, who was unhurt. In any case, more than seventy men of the “Endymion’s” crew, besides her first and second lieutenant, were killed, wounded, or captured; and the “Prince of Neufchatel” arrived in safety in Boston.
In the want of adjacent rocks lined with armed Americans, such as Captain Lloyd alleged at Fayal, Captain Hope was reduced to plead the tides as the cause of his defeat. These reports, better than any other evidence, showed the feelings of the British naval service in admitting discomfiture in the last resort of its pride. Successively obliged to plead inferiority at the guns, inferiority in sailing qualities, inferiority in equipment, the British service saw itself compelled by these repeated and bloody repulses to admit that its supposed pre-eminence in hand-to-hand fighting was a delusion. Within a single fortnight two petty privateers, with crews whose united force did not amount to one hundred and fifty men, succeeded in repulsing attacks made by twice their number of the best British seamen, inflicting a loss, in killed and wounded, officially reported at one hundred and eighty-five.
Such mortifying and bloody experiences made even the British navy weary of the war. Valuable prizes were few, and the service, especially in winter, was severe. Undoubtedly the British cruisers caught privateers by dozens, and were as successful in the performance of their duties as ever they had been in any war in Europe. Their blockade of American ports was real and ruinous, and nothing pretended to resist them. Yet after catching scores of swift cruisers, they saw scores of faster and better vessels issue from the blockaded ports and harry British commerce in every sea. Scolded by the press, worried by the Admiralty, and mortified by their own want of success, the British navy was obliged to hear language altogether strange to its experience.
“The American cruisers daily enter in among our convoys,” said the “Times” of February 11, 1815, “seize prizes in sight of those that should afford protection, and if pursued ‘put on their sea-wings’ and laugh at the clumsy English pursuers. To what is this owing? Cannot we build ships?... It must indeed he encouraging to Mr. Madison to read the logs of his cruisers. If they fight, they are sure to conquer; if they fly, they are sure to escape.”