At the time the Guerrière went into the fight she was commanded by Captain James Richard Dacres. In the course of the cruise during which the squadron under Broke chased the Constitution, Captain Dacres dined on board the Shannon. While pacing the deck of the Shannon, after dinner, and talking with Broke, Captain Dacres said emphatically of his ship:
“I say, she looks beautiful; and more, she’d take an antagonist in half the time the Shannon could.”
On making full allowance for a captain’s disposition to boast unduly of the qualities of his ship, it is still fair to say that Dacres considered her at any rate equal to the Shannon, although the Shannon carried more guns.
To strengthen this conclusion it may be added that Captain Dacres sent a challenge to Captain Rodgers of the President, which was a sister ship to the Constitution. Further than that we have the words of Captain Dacres when he was court-martialled for losing her: “I am so well aware that the success of my opponent was owing to fortune, that it is my earnest wish, and would be the happiest moment of my life, to be once more opposed to the Constitution in a frigate of similar force to the Guerrière.”
These assertions must appear to every reader to be a confession of faith in his ship. Nor was Captain Dacres alone in his belief that she was a good one.
“The Guerrière is as fine a frigate as we can boast of,” said the St. Christopher’s Gazette in the same year, while lamenting her loss.
What the English newspapers thought of the Constitution before this battle with the Guerrière is also worth repeating. The opinions they expressed were, of course, a repetition of those expressed by British naval officers, who had visited her at various times, but notably after she had called at Portsmouth as related in a preceding chapter. They spoke of her as “a bunch of pine boards,” and as “a fir-built ship with a bit of striped bunting at her mast-head,” and “their opinions gave rise to various excellent jokes that were uttered in and out of the British Parliament at the commencement of the war.”
To these statements must be added the further fact that the boastful captain of the Guerrière had taken the trouble to notify the Americans that his ship “was not the Little Belt,” referring to the affair in which the Little Belt was so severely pounded by a Yankee frigate.
The Constitution sailed from Boston on August 2, 1812. Captain Hull had reported his escape from the British squadron in a modest letter to the Navy Department, but he did not wait for further orders from the Secretary. He conjectured that his narrow escape would so frighten the timid officials, who had previously warned him in his official instructions not to voluntarily engage any superior force, that they would keep him lying inactive in port. In this conjecture he was entirely right, for a few days after he had sailed, orders to that effect did arrive. A good naval authority says that “had the Constitution been captured on the cruise, Hull would have been hanged or shot for sailing without orders.” It has often been a matter of consolation to American naval officers in these last years of the nineteenth century to read of the incapacity and cowardice of department officials in the early years of it.
Having taken the risk, Captain Hull coasted along to the north as far as the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On August 15th five vessels were seen in a bunch, and on approaching them, four scattered away, leaving the fifth, a brig, on fire. One was chased and found to be an English merchantman in the hands of an American prize crew. Before night the American brig Adeline was overhauled and taken from the British prize crew found on board of her. On the night of the 18th a third vessel was overhauled after a smart race, and this was an unfortunate affair, for she proved to be the American privateer Decatur, of fourteen guns, twelve of which had been thrown overboard in her mad race with the Constitution.