Looking for a Scout.
(p. 390)
Early in the year 1813, the sloop Hornet, roaming at will over the green fields of water, pricked on by Captain James Lawrence, lit on the British Peacock, and so worried her, that in fifteen minutes she fluttered down, down into the opening green gulfs below, with all her bright, well-spread colors. Promoted to the Chesapeake, manned or rather unmanned by an undrilled, miscellaneous crew which had drifted on her decks, the brave Lawrence, counselled more by a chivalric honor than by a cool prudence, accepted the murderous, Burr-like challenge of the well-practised Shannon, carrying a picked and veteran crew and corps of marines. The ill-handled, entangled, and disabled Chesapeake was boarded, and the intrepid commander, carried below with a mortal wound, stammered out that immortal order which hurtles hotly through histories and navies, “Don’t give up the ship.”
On Lake Erie, Commodore Perry, in September, 1813, with a small squadron embraced and took a superior British fleet, announcing his resisted possession in another lively, well-planted message, which floats like a buoy in the crowded harbor of historical anchorage,—“We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
During this year, as in the preceding, American privateers swept from the wavy floor of the ocean hundreds of merchantmen. Forthwith English courts, English premiers, and English writers on international law bristled with freshly sharpened horror at the sin of privateering,—a most un-Christian practice they averred, as it tended violently to abridge the marine wealth of England.
In 1814 a varied war business was transacted between the United States and Great Britain. In July—that month for excursions to Niagara Falls—Generals Scott and Ripley crossed the hurrying river near the cataract, and took Fort Erie, which, fortunately for the hackmen, they left like a toll-gate, to entice yearly from travellers its original cost. As if to increase the wonders of this taking neighborhood, two days after the capture of Fort Erie, the battle of Chippewa was fought, in which bayonets were actually crossed,—a rare checker-work, although often talked of in those select romances, the despatches of raw militia generals, who, in their first sight of glancing steel and first smell of villainous[villainous] saltpetre, see many things crosswise and crooked. Fifteen days later, Winfield Scott made a ghostly spectacle, at Lundy’s Lane, of great numbers of well-seasoned British Regulars.
Fortunate Niagara! in owning so many wonders,
“The moving accidents of flood and field.”
Human phosphates are here most advantageously diluted with large parts of uncounted water.
Meanwhile, the veteran English squadrons which had served under Wellington, in Spain and Portugal, glorified by victories over Ney, Massena, Marmont, Soult, and Joseph Bonaparte,—their bullet-slitted flags inscribed “Torres Vedras,” “Talavera,” “Ciudad Rodrigo,” “Almeida,” “Salamanca,” “Madrid,” and “Vittoria,”—mustering fourteen thousand men, and led by Sir George Prevost, pushed down from Canada upon Plattsburg, where General Macomb had assembled fifteen hundred men. Crossing the little river Saranac, on one side of which Plattsburg stood, in modest, village quiet, Macomb posted his men. Like cedar posts, these unseasoned troops stood rooted to the soil, stubbornly refusing to bend before the furious storm of grape and canister which swept through them for four days. While this heroic endurance was maintained on the land side, in front of the village and on the vitreous surface of Lake Champlain, Commandant Thomas Macdonough, on the morning of September 11, with a squadron of fourteen small vessels, carrying 86 guns and 850 officers and men, anchoring in the bay and awaiting the approach of a British fleet of sixteen ships, with 95 guns and 1,000 men, so charged the common trading waters of the lake with soul-lifting influences, that even commerce seems to bear there its pennons more stiffly ever since, and ordinary smacks to kiss the wind with a lover’s trancing relish.