As the reader will remember, the United States sailed on the cruise during which she captured the Macedonian with Commodore John Rodgers of the President, the Congress and the Argus being also of the squadron. The President proved unlucky on that voyage, for she got nothing. Her hard luck continued in the cruise that followed. In company with the Congress, Captain John Smith, the President sailed from Boston on April 30, 1813. Two days later the little British sloop-of-war Curlew, Captain Michael Head, was seen, but after a protracted chase the Curlew escaped. A little later the two frigates separated and the Congress cruised in the South Atlantic all the summer and part of the fall, and finally returned to Portsmouth, New Haven, having been at sea two hundred and nineteen days and taken four merchant-ships. The President cruised first on the Grand Banks, then near the Azores, and from there sailed to the north and around the Shetland Islands to the port of Bergen, where she stopped for supplies. Sailing thence she eventually got back to the Nantucket Shoals on September 23d. There she fell in with the British schooner Highflyer, and by posing as a British frigate and sending a lieutenant dressed in a British uniform on board of her, succeeded in getting the book of private signals and instructions.
Meantime, while off North Cape in company with the American privateer Scourge, Rodgers was chased by two British ships. He said in his journal that the two were “a line-of-battle ship and a frigate.” The British say that the two were the thirty-two-gun frigate Alexandria (she carried long twelves for her main battery) and the sloop Spitfire, of about twenty guns. There seems to be no reason for doubting that Rodgers did make the mistake attributed to him. Others made mistakes like that, as will appear farther on.
The book captured from the Highfiyer proved valuable in a variety of ways, but chiefly because it gave the numbers and stations of British war-ships on the American coast, and so enabled American commanders to avoid the British squadrons. A private circular from the British Admiralty ordered the captains of all British war-ships to make special efforts to capture the President.
Just why the British Navy should have felt such great animosity toward this ship is hard to understand in this day. Certainly she was not the most formidable of the American ships. In fact she had been so overloaded with guns that she proved a poor sailer (witness the escape of the Belvidera and the Curlew), and eventually, she was hogged so that she was captured (as will be told farther on) in a race where the Constitution would have escaped easily. Nevertheless, the Admiralty, as said, were especially anxious to capture her, and the animosity of the British nation against her was so great that even thirty years after the war was over, the “British Naval Chronicle” still spoke of her as “the waggon”—a term, by the way, that suggests the naval tar’s contempt for hay-makers, and recalls the deeds of the Yankee hay-makers when afloat in the war of the Revolution.
Quite different was the luck of the sloop Argus, the smallest of the ships that sailed with Rodgers in that first Yankee squadron cruise of the War of 1812. When she returned from that cruise, William H. Allen, who had gained fame for his part in the capture of the Macedonian, was placed in command of her. The reader will remember that it was Allen who fired on the Leopard when she attacked the Chesapeake in time of peace to re-impress some American seamen, carrying a coal from the galley fire in his naked hand for the purpose for lack of matches. With this incident in mind to indicate his character, the uninformed reader will be prepared for the story of his fate which follows.
The Argus Burning British Vessels.
From an old wood-cut.
The sailing orders which Allen, who now had the rank of master-commandant, received, directed him to carry to France Mr. William H. Crawford, the newly appointed American Minister to that nation. The Argus sailed on this errand from New York on June 18, 1813, and reached L’Orient twenty-three days later. Having refitted his ship, Captain Allen emulated the famous deeds of John Paul Jones and other Revolutionary heroes by sailing boldly into the English Channel and thence around Land’s End into the Irish Sea. It was a short but a brilliant cruise. The Argus sailed on July 14, 1813. Ship after ship was taken, some of them right under the cliffs of the British coast. Some were sunk and some were burned. A few of the more valuable were manned and sent to French ports. Indeed, so many prizes were taken that the crew became worn out with the work. The Argus was at sea but one month and yet twenty ships, valued at $2,500,000, were taken in that time. Of course all hands had to be on deck, and at work during every chase, and while each prize was disposed of. They were far too successful for their own personal welfare. As in the days when the Reprisal, under Captain Lambert Wickes, and the Surprise, under Captain Gustavus Connyngham, so now the British ship-merchants were filled with dismay and the insurance companies put up the rate on war-risks to a fabulous per cent. Cruisers were sent hurriedly to sea in search of the bold Yankee, and the Argus must needs fight or run very soon. Just one month from the day she sailed, the hour for a choice between these two courses had arrived.
At 5 o’clock on August 14, 1813, the lookout saw a big British brig coming down the wind under a full press of canvas. It was the Pelican, Captain John Fordyce Maples. Maples had put into Cork three days before, and had learned that a Yankee cruiser, of no great force, was destroying the British coastwise trade, and he at once sailed in search of the bold offender.