As the President did all of her fighting with the Endymion and surrendered as soon as the other two frigates were upon her, the losses on both are interesting. The President lost twenty-four killed and fifty-five wounded. The Endymion lost eleven killed and fourteen wounded. Since the President threw 765 pounds of shot to the Endymion’s 680, the difference in casualties seems remarkable until it is noted that the President fired chiefly at the Endymion’s rigging—it was a fight to escape on the part of the President after it was found the Endymion could not be boarded. Decatur crippled the Endymion until she was thrown out of the battle absolutely. He could have chosen his position and shot her to pieces had she been alone. He “incidentally killed eleven men.” The Endymion’s gunners aimed lower, and killed more. The battle lasted two hours and a half.
The President was carried to the Bermudas. There a newspaper called the Gazette printed an article so scandalous that the British officers compelled the editor to publish a retraction, and a pugnacious midshipman, R. B. Randolph, of the President, publicly thrashed him. But the articles in this newspaper are used by the historian James in writing the story of the capture.
On the way to the Bermudas a gale came on, when the President was dismasted. The Endymion was not only dismasted but had to throw over all the guns (short thirty-twos) on her forecastle and quarter-deck. The President was so badly strained when on the bar at Sandy Hook that she was never commissioned in the British Navy. But, although she had been derisively called “the waggon” while she carried the American flag, her lines were followed by her captors in building new ships after she was taken, and so, too, was her style of armament.
It is interesting, in view of the changes in British naval ideas which the two American frigates they captured wrought, to note that in Peake’s “Rudiments of Naval Architecture,” a British work, formerly a text-book in all English-speaking navies, the ideal frigate there described has a gun-deck length of one hundred and seventy-six feet, a breadth of fifty-two feet, and a depth of hold of only seventeen feet—which, if slang be permitted, is “seeing” the American model and “going several better.” The President was one hundred and seventy-five feet long by forty-five broad and twenty deep. And as for guns, while the Yankees of 1812 used long twenty-fours for the main-deck battery, to the infinite amusement as well as the scorn of the British, Peake’s ideal frigate carried six long eight-inch guns (sixty-eight-pounders!) and twenty-two long thirty-twos, besides twenty-two thirty-twos on the upper deck that were only a foot shorter-than those below. Thus they had, with experience, added to the weight of the broadside they found on the President one hundred and forty-three pounds, and by the use of long upper-deck guns they had vastly increased the effectiveness of a broadside.
CHAPTER X
THE NAVY AT THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS
THE BRITISH GRAB AT THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI—STOPPED AT LAKE BORGNE BY THE YANKEE GUNBOATS UNDER LIEUTENANT THOMAS AP CATESBY JONES—THE BRITISH CAME FIVE TO ONE IN NUMBERS AND ALMOST FOUR TO ONE IN WEIGHT OF METAL—DEFENDING THE SEAHORSE WITH FOURTEEN MEN AGAINST ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE—THE FULL BRITISH FORCE DRIVEN UPON TWO GUNBOATS—A MOST HEROIC DEFENCE THAT LASTED, IN SPITE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS, MORE THAN ONE HOUR—INDOMITABLE SAILING-MASTER GEORGE ULRICH—A FIGHT, THE MEMORY OF WHICH STILL HELPS TO PRESERVE THE PEACE—WORK OF THE CAROLINE AND THE LOUISIANA.
Small space is given in ordinary histories to the doings of the Navy in connection with the defence of New Orleans, when it was attacked by the British at the end of the War of 1812. As the reader will remember, the expedition against New Orleans was planned for the purpose of wresting from the United States the whole valley of the Mississippi. As France had endeavored in the eighteenth century to establish an empire, extending from the Great Lakes through the Mississippi water-shed to the Gulf of Mexico, that should hem in the British colonies on the Atlantic, so now the English strove to gain possession of what has become the heart of the American republic. The reader has only to consider what would have been the consequences of British possession of the metropolis of the Louisiana purchase to understand how the British Government has always looked ahead when seeking for territorial aggrandizement.
From an American point of view this expedition against New Orleans was infamous, for the reason that ministers representing both nations were negotiating a treaty of peace at Ghent when the order for the attack was issued. As one reads of the strength of the force sent to accomplish this work, it seems invincible. “A great fleet of war-vessels—ships-of-the-line, frigates, and sloops—under Admiral Cochrane was convoying a still larger fleet of troop-ships, with some ten thousand fighting men, chiefly the fierce and hardy veterans of the Peninsula War, who had been trained for seven years in the stern school of the Iron Duke, and who were now led by one of the bravest and ablest of all Wellington’s brave and able lieutenants, Sir Edward Packenham.”
Sir Edward Michael Packenham.