Fight Between the Brig Chasseur and the Schooner St. Lawrence off Havana, February 26, 1815.
From a lithograph in Coggeshall’s “Privateers.”
And a right brave action was that which Captain Boyle, of the Baltimore clipper Chasseur, made with the British war-schooner, St. Lawrence. Boyle ran down on the St. Lawrence by mistake. He thought her a merchantman. But when alongside he fought it out, and in just fifteen minutes from the firing of the first gun the enemy’s flag came down. This was extraordinary for two reasons. The enemy was a regular man-o’-war, and she was also of superior force. The enemy carried twelve short twelves and one long nine. Boyle at this time had six long twelves and eight short nines, but having no nine-pound shot he used a four-pound and a six-pound shot together. It was a fight yard-arm to yard-arm, so that the enemy’s broadside of eighty-one pounds was better than Boyle’s of seventy-six, even though Boyle could fire three long twelves. Accounts differ as to the number of men engaged. Boyle had eighty all told. He said he took out of the St. Lawrence eighty-nine besides passengers. Since no one but James disputes this there is no reason for doubting Boyle. James understates the number of the British crew because they struck when the privateersmen were boarding. The Yankee lost five killed and eight wounded; the British six killed and seventeen wounded.
The fights herein recorded were the most famous made by the privateers of this war. The sea militia were on these occasions well led, and therefore as brave as regular naval seamen. A careful study of the fights of this kind shows that in the majority of the cases where a privateer was attacked by a British man-o’-war crew the privateer surrendered militia fashion—tamely. But where the officers were men of sound nerves the fight was as desperate and about as well conducted as any naval fight involving the same forces. The fact that the Yankee privateers in this war took and destroyed or sent in about 1,600 British ships, including a considerable number of small war-ships, while the total number of Yankee ships taken by the British was only five hundred—this fact is significant. The total number of Yankee privateers was two hundred and fifty. Their record on the whole was so good that the fame of their deeds helped to preserve the peace of their country long after their timbers had rotted away; and it still helps.
CHAPTER IX
A YANKEE FRIGATE TAKEN BY THE ENEMY
THEY COMPLETELY MOBBED “THE WAGGON” AND SO GOT HER AT LAST—THE FIRST NAVAL CONTEST AFTER THE TREATY OF PEACE WAS SIGNED—THE PRESIDENT, WHEN RUNNING THE BLOCKADE AT NEW YORK, GROUNDED ON THE BAR, AND, ALTHOUGH SHE POUNDED OVER, SHE FELL IN WITH THE SQUADRON—A BRITISH FRIGATE THOROUGHLY WHIPPED, BUT TWO MORE OVERTOOK HER—A POINT ON NAVAL ARCHITECTURE—A TREATY THAT HUMILIATES THE PATRIOT.
The treaty which the British and American commissioners negotiated at Ghent and which they signed on December 24, 1814, is as instructive as it is humiliating to an American patriot. There are eleven articles to this treaty. These provided for a cessation of hostilities; for a boundary line; for public and private property and documents captured, or to be captured before the ratification of the treaty; for the red Indians of the frontier; for the negro slaves and the suppression of the black slave trade on the high seas. It provided for everything needful but one. The American Government had been forced to declare war because of a popular sentiment generated by the friends of the American seamen who had been forced into slavery by British press-gangs: the American naval seamen had fought as no naval seaman had ever fought before because they were fighting for “sailors’ rights”; but when the treaty of peace was written there was not one word in it about those rights—not one. The British ministers stubbornly refused to touch upon or even consider the subject of impressment, and the American commissioners, on the plea that the question was now “purely theoretical,”—that, the war in Europe being over, there would be no longer any occasion for impressment—the American commissioners, be it said, consented to omit the point. The real cause of the war was ignored in the treaty of peace.
It is humiliating to a patriot to recall this fact, but it is equally humiliating to remember that the motto on the big burgee flaunted by Yankee cruisers read “Free trade and Sailors’ Rights.” The rights of property were placed ahead of the rights of man. The sneer of the British historian Napier, when he referred to the Americans as “a people who (notwithstanding the curse of black slavery which clings to them, adding the most horrible ferocity to the peculiar baseness of their mercantile spirit, and rendering their republican vanity ridiculous) do, in their general government, uphold civil institutions that have startled the crazy despotisms of Europe”—this sneer was justified in its day, by the treaty of Ghent, as by the treatment accorded the unfortunate colored race.
Nevertheless, because of the qualities displayed by the American seamen, from the battle between the Guerrière and the Constitution to Macdonough’s victory on Lake Champlain, and in all the naval encounters, except possibly one that followed the signing of the treaty—because of the hearty good will that backed the strong and well-trained arm of the republican sailor, what was denied in the promise of peace was granted when peace came. The British politicians quibbled and the British historians have garbled and sneered, but the full significance of the naval battles of the War of 1812 was and is appreciated by the real rulers of the British nation. And that significance, though it brought a treaty—a written document—that is humiliating, brought a lasting state of peace that was and is a matter of pride to all who honor the flag. It did more. The manifest superiority of the American seamen was so great that, by degrees, the British naval authorities were led to abandon their cruel methods of manning and disciplining their ships and to adopt the American system of good pay and good food and just treatment instead. Treating men as men has worked as well, these late years, in the British navy, as it has always worked in the American. Moreover a day was to come when the British Government was to say, in a most emphatic Government document, that the American declaration of war in 1812 was entirely justified.