The Essex, 32, Captain David Porter, left the Delaware on Oct. 28th, two days after Commodore Bainbridge had left Boston. She expected to make a very long cruise and so carried with her an unusual quantity of stores and sixty more men than ordinarily, so that her muster-roll contained 319 names. Being deep in the water she reached San Jago after Bainbridge had left. Nothing was met with until after the Essex had crossed the equator in longitude 30° W. on Dec. 11th. On the afternoon of the next day a sail was made out to windward, and chased. At nine in the evening it was overtaken, and struck after receiving a volley of musketry which killed one man. The prize proved to be the British packet Nocton, of 10 guns and 31 men, with $55,000 in specie aboard. The latter was taken out, and the Nocton sent home with Lieutenant Finch and a prize crew of 17 men, but was recaptured by a British frigate.
The next appointed rendezvous was the Island of Fernando de Noronha, where Captain Porter found a letter from Commodore Bainbridge, informing him that the other vessels were off Cape Frio. Thither cruised Porter, but his compatriots had left. On the 29th he captured an English merchant vessel; and he was still cruising when the year closed.
The year 1812, on the ocean, ended as gloriously as it had begun. In four victorious fights the disparity in loss had been so great as to sink the disparity of force into insignificance. Our successes had been unaccompanied by any important reverse. Nor was it alone by the victories, but by the cruises, that the year was noteworthy. The Yankee men-of-war sailed almost in sight of the British coast and right in the tract of the merchant fleets and their armed protectors. Our vessels had shown themselves immensely superior to their foes.
The reason of these striking and unexpected successes was that our navy in 1812 was the exact reverse of what our navy is now, in 1882. I am not alluding to the personnel, which still remains excellent; but, whereas we now have a large number of worthless vessels, standing very low down in their respective classes, we then possessed a few vessels, each unsurpassed by any foreign ship of her class. To bring up our navy to the condition in which it stood in 1812 it would not be necessary (although in reality both very wise and in the end very economical) to spend any more money than at present; only instead of using it to patch up a hundred antiquated hulks, it should be employed in building half a dozen ships on the most effective model. If in 1812 our ships had borne the same relation to the British ships that they do now, not all the courage and skill of our sailors would have won us a single success. As it was, we could only cope with the lower rates, and had no vessels to oppose to the great "liners"; but to-day there is hardly any foreign ship, no matter how low its rate, that is not superior to the corresponding American ones. It is too much to hope that our political shortsightedness will ever enable us to have a navy that is first-class in point of size; but there certainly seems no reason why what ships we have should not be of the very best quality. The effect of a victory is two-fold, moral and material. Had we been as roughly handled on water as we were on land during the first year of the war, such a succession of disasters would have had a most demoralizing effect on the nation at large. As it was, our victorious seafights, while they did not inflict any material damage upon the colossal sea-might of England, had the most important results in the feelings they produced at home and even abroad. Of course they were magnified absurdly by most of our writers at the time; but they do not need to be magnified, for as they are any American can look back upon them with the keenest national pride. For a hundred and thirty years England had had no equal on the sea; and now she suddenly found one in the untried navy of an almost unknown power.
BRITISH VESSELS CAPTURED OR DESTROYED IN 1812.
Name. Guns. Tonnage. Remarks.
Guerrière 49 1,340
Macedonian 49 1,325
Java 49 1,340
Frolic 19 477 Recaptured.
Alert 20 323
_____ _______
186 4,807
19 477 Deducting Frolic.
_____ _______
167 4,330
AMERICAN VESSELS CAPTURED OR DESTROYED.
Name. Guns. Tonnage.
Wasp 18 450
Nautilus 14 185
Vixen 14 185
_____ _______
46 820
VESSELS BUILT IN 1812.
Name. Rig. Guns. Tonnage. Where Built. Cost. Nonsuch Schooner 14 148 Charleston $15,000 Carolina Schooner 14 230 " 8,743 Louisiana Ship 16 341 New Orleans 15,500