A moment later the Yankees on deck began to cheer, and, hearing them, Lancey raised his head, waved an arm that had been partly shot away, gave three feeble cheers, and fell back dead.
Another tale of the battle says that after the British captains were in the Constitution’s cabin a midshipman came in to ask Captain Stewart if the men could have their evening grog. As the time for serving it had passed before the battle began, Captain Stewart asked if they had not had it already, and the midshipman replied, to the astonishment of the Englishmen:
“No, sir. It was mixed ready for serving just before the battle began, but the older sailors of the crew said they didn’t want any ‘Dutch courage’ on board and capsized the grog-tub in the lee scuppers.”
Later still the two Englishmen, according to Gilder, got into a heated dispute, each blaming the other for making manœuvres that lost the battle, but Stewart stopped the quarrel. He said:
“Gentlemen, there is no use in getting warm about it; it would have been all the same whatever you might have done. If you doubt that, I will put you all on board again and you can try it over.”
As to the relative force, Allen says that the Cyane was of a class known as “donkey frigates,” and that she carried twenty-two short thirty-twos on the main deck and eight short eighteens and two nines on quarter-deck and forecastle. Lieutenant Hoffman, who took charge of her, says she had two more short eighteens. This is no doubt the truth of the matter. It is agreed that the Levant carried eighteen short thirty-twos, two long nines, and a short twelve that could be worked on either side. The two together carried a crew of three hundred and twenty, of whom thirty-nine were boys, according to Allen. The combined crews could fire a broadside of seven hundred and fifty-four pounds to the Constitution’s six hundred and forty-four pounds net weight. Without mentioning the Constitution’s number of men, which was at most four hundred and fifty-six, we can concede what Allen claims, the “immense superiority” of the Yankee. For not only were the long twenty-fours of the Constitution far and away better than the short thirty-twos of the British ships, just as the long guns of the Phœbe and Cherub were superior to the short guns of the Essex at Valparaiso: the crew of the Constitution had been trained very much better than any ordinary British crew. More important still, the force of the Constitution was concentrated in a single ship under the command of one able man. The force of the British was divided between two ships and could not be so well handled. When the British Court of Inquiry at Halifax “applauded” the British officers “for the gallant defence each had made,” it did something which an American writer finds pleasure in placing before American readers. But when, as Allen relates, “the Court also expressed to the remaining crew of the Cyane, in the strongest terms, the sense entertained of their determined loyalty in resisting the temptations held out by the enemy to draw them from their allegiance, which they retained also under circumstances of almost unprecedented severity exercised toward them whilst on board the Constitution,” it placed on its records a falsehood. The charge was false on its face, for the lowest count of the crew of the Constitution, after the battle, as printed in any American work, gives her four hundred and forty-four men, of whom ten, at most, were wounded more or less. After manning her prizes she still had an ample crew to work the ship and man another prize or two. Because the Yankee sailors were treated like men, were well-fed and well-paid, the Yankee frigates in this war, with the exception of the black-listed Chesapeake, were fully manned. There was no occasion for recruiting among the British prisoners. Moreover, when this falsehood was first published, the officers of the Constitution denied under oath the charge, and said further, that, instead of trying to seduce the British crews, many of the British seamen volunteered to ship on board the Constitution but were in no case permitted to do so, because “the loss of the Chesapeake had taught us the danger of having renegades aboard.”
Medal Awarded to Charles Stewart after the Battle of the Constitution with the Cyane and Levant.
The Constitution lost six killed and nine more or less wounded. The donkey frigate Cyane lost twelve killed and twenty-six wounded out of her crew of one hundred and eighty; the Levant lost seven killed and sixteen wounded out of one hundred and forty. The British gunners did about as poorly as usual in their Navy of that day. The Yankee gunners did rather worse than usual. They were at close range long enough to sink both of the enemy’s ships had they done as well as the Hornet’s crew did with the British Peacock, or the Wasp with the British Avon. The battle was, and is, famous not for its gunnery, but for the magnificent manner in which Captain Stewart handled his ship. Other captains—Hull and Bainbridge, for instance—had handled her when a single enemy turned and twisted and fore-reached, but Stewart backed and filled and reached and wore to meet the manœuvres of two ships that, commanded by the ablest of British seamen, strove to cross and rake him. And not only did he meet their movements—not only did he avoid a raking himself, but he raked each of them repeatedly. No better seamanship was ever displayed.
By hard work after the battle, the Yankee seamen got all three ships in sailing order before 2 o’clock next morning, and they sailed to Porto Praya, in the island of St. Jago, Cape de Verde, where they arrived on March 10, 1815. Here a merchant brig was employed as a cartel to carry the prisoners. The next day came on with a thick fog lying low over the water while the air above the top-gallant yards was comparatively clear. The Americans were busy at 12.05 o’clock (noon) transferring the prisoners, when a large sail was seen from the deck standing into the harbor. There was plainly no lookout aloft, and Captain Stewart was well-nigh caught napping.