Broke.
The Fight on the Chesapeake’s Forecastle.
From a lithograph in the “Memoir of Admiral Broke.”
Six weeks later George Crowninshield, jr., a privateersman, and ten other ship-masters, went to Halifax in the brig Henry under a flag of truce, and brought home the bodies of Captain Lawrence and Lieutenant Ludlow, and they were interred in Trinity cemetery, in lower Broadway, New York. The monument of the two men can be seen by the curious wayfarer at the southeast corner of the old brown-stone pile. On the end that faces Broadway are these words:
Neither the fury of battle, the anguish of a mortal wound, nor the horrors of approaching death could subdue his gallant spirit. His dying words were
“Don’t Give up the Ship.”
The report of the capture of the Chesapeake which was published in London immediately on the arrival of the news was a forged document. Broke was lying delirious in his cabin from the time the Shannon arrived in Halifax until after the brig that carried the news to England had sailed. Yet a formal report, signed with his name, was published in London immediately after the brig arrived. And it is this forged document that forms the basis of the British accounts of the fight.
The conventional comparison of the ships shows that the Chesapeake carried forty-nine guns, throwing 540 pounds of metal at a broadside, to the Shannon’s fifty-two, throwing 547 pounds. Her crew numbered 340 to the Shannon’s 330. The Chesapeake lost forty-seven killed, and ninety-nine wounded, while the Shannon lost only twenty-four killed and fifty-nine wounded. “Training and discipline won the victory” over a “scrub” crew; but it should be kept in mind that this crew was untrained because there had been no time to train it. If Captain Lawrence had had the six weeks which the Java had before meeting the Constitution, it would not have been a “scrub” crew. And it is worth noting that even this crew inflicted far more injury on the Shannon than either of the British frigates thus far captured had inflicted on her American antagonist. The Shannon was struck by twelve eighteen-pound shot, thirteen thirty-two-pound shot and fourteen bar shot.
“The Americans were filled with a profound gloom and an unreasonable loss of confidence in their navy, while the English gave vent to extravagant demonstrations of joy, simply because an English frigate had captured an American of the same force.” Considering the course of the naval war up to that time, however, an unprejudiced student must say that the British joy was not unreasonable if the American gloom was. The British made Broke a baronet and a Knight Commander of the Bath. London gave him a sword and the “freedom of the city.” The Tower guns were fired in honor of the victory. The joy which this lone victory gave the British people is the strongest proof of their faith in, and admiration for, American prowess. Broke saw no active service after the battle. He died in 1841.
