James Lawrence.
From an engraving by Edwin of the portrait of Stuart.
As it happened, Lawrence, who had been the last to earn the applause of his countrymen, was to be the victim of the growing vanity of his navy. In the frigate Chesapeake he sailed out of Boston to meet the Shannon. As the people of Carrickfergus in the north of Ireland went out on an excursion fleet to see Captain Burden of the British ship Drake thrash the life out of John Paul Jones in the American ship Ranger, so the people of Boston flocked to the sea in all sorts of craft and climbed to heights overlooking the water that they might see Lawrence bring in the bold Captain Broke, who was cruising to and fro, anxious for a combat. That they returned humiliated was due to the fact that Lawrence went into the battle in the spirit of Dacres and Carden, while Broke went into it in the spirit of Hull and Decatur.
When Lawrence returned from the cruise on the coast of South America he applied to the Secretary of the Navy for the command of the Constitution. After some correspondence his request was granted, and then the order was recalled, and he was sent, very much against his will, to the Chesapeake. His dislike for the Chesapeake will be very well understood by any sailor when it is recalled that she was the unlucky ship of the navy. She had sailed from Boston under Captain Evans, on December 13, 1812, and had arrived back on April 9, 1813. She had captured five merchantmen, and had escaped when chased by a British seventy-four and a frigate, but that was all she had done. On reaching port there was trouble in her crew over the payment of the prize money, and most of them left her, the two years for which they had shipped being ended. Evans left her because of trouble with his eyes. It would have been better for her new commander if more of the crew had left, for of those who stayed not a few were foreigners, and these were under the influence of a Portuguese boatswain’s mate. That a Portuguese, of all nationalities, should have been trusted even with a petty office shows to an American sailor the character of the crew whom Lawrence found on board. Among other foreigners, too, were thirty-two of English birth.
The exact day when Lawrence arrived is not recorded, but he did not leave the Hornet in New York until after May 10th, and that was in the time of stage coaches. It was at about the middle of May that he took command. A still further indication of the condition of affairs on board is found in the fact that Acting-Lieutenant Pierce was allowed to leave the ship, as Lawrence explained it, because of “his being at variance with every officer in his mess.”
With a ship that, figuratively speaking, carried the flag of the “Flying Dutchman,” and with the nucleus of a crew in a mutinous state of mind over a failure to get the prize money to which they believed themselves entitled, Lawrence began fitting out for sea. The wages in the navy then were fair, and the glory of the flag undimmed, but getting sailors for the Chesapeake was the hardest work of the life of her commander. Nor was it merely that she was an unlucky ship. It must not be forgotten that hosts of American seafaring men were then by force serving in the British navy, while more than two thousand of them were then in Dartmoor prison in England, whither they had been sent by such of the English captains as were humane enough not to compel an American to fight against his flag. Of the few American seamen who remained to man American ships not many were found to ship on a man-o’-war. The privateers, of whom some stirring tales remain to be told, had picked them off the streets. The crew which Captain Lawrence obtained was precisely such a crew as a ship fresh from an English port in those days would have had naturally—a crew that was swept up from the streets as a whole, and yet contained a considerable number of experienced, capable men. It was what a football expert would call a scrub team. It was a crew that in six weeks might have been trained by Lawrence to fight as one man, but Lawrence never had the opportunity to train it.
The Chesapeake was fitting for a voyage to the east, where she could intercept British ships bound for the St. Lawrence, and thence to the Greenland whale fishery. The Hornet, under Master Commandant James Biddle, was to meet the Chesapeake at Cape Canso.
Meantime a British ship-of-the-line, and the frigate Shannon, Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke (the ship that had chased the Constitution for three days), had been blockading the port of Boston, but Broke, who was looking for laurels in a single-ship fight with an American frigate, sent the ship-of-the-line away, and alone maintained the blockade.
