THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE"
"The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!
You, Gunnel, keep the helm in hand—
Thus, thus, boys! steady, steady,
Till right ahead you see the land—
Then soon as you are ready,
The signal to engage shall be
A whistle and a hollo;
Be one and all but firm, like me,
And conquest soon will follow!"
—C. DIBDIN.
On the early morning of June 1, 1813, a solitary British frigate, H.M.S. Shannon, was cruising within sight of Boston lighthouse. She was a ship of about 1000 tons, and bore every mark of long and hard service. No gleam of colour sparkled about her. Her sides were rusty, her sails weather-stained; a solitary flag flew from her mizzen-peak, and even its blue had been bleached by sun and rain and wind to a dingy grey. A less romantic and more severely practical ship did not float, and her captain was of the same type as the ship.
Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke was an Englishman pur sang, and of a type happily not uncommon. His fame will live as long as the British flag flies, yet a more sober and prosaic figure can hardly be imagined. He was not, like Nelson, a quarter-deck Napoleon; he had no gleam of Dundonald's matchless ruse de guerre. He was as deeply religious as Havelock or one of Cromwell's major-generals; he had the frugality of a Scotchman, and the heavy-footed common-sense of a Hollander. He was as nautical as a web-footed bird, and had no more "nerves" than a fish. A domestic Englishman, whose heart was always with the little girls at Brokehall, in Suffolk, but for whom the service of his country was a piety, and who might have competed with Lawrence for his self-chosen epitaph, "Here lies one who tried to do his duty."
A sober-suited, half-melancholy common-sense was Broke's characteristic, and he had applied it to the working of his ship, till he had made the vessel, perhaps, the most formidable fighting machine of her size afloat. He drilled his gunners until, from the swaying platform of their decks, they shot with a deadly coolness and accuracy nothing floating could resist. Broke, as a matter of fact, owed his famous victory over the Chesapeake to one of his matter-of-fact precautions. The first broadside fired by the Chesapeake sent a 32-pound shot through one of the gun-room cabins into the magazine passage of the Shannon, where it might easily have ignited some grains of loose powder and blown the ship up, if Broke had not taken the precaution of elaborately damping that passage before the action began. The prosaic side of Broke's character is very amusing. In his diary he records his world-famous victory thus:—
"June 1st.—Off Boston. Moderate."
"N.W.—W(rote) Laurence."
"P.M.—Took Chesapeake."
Was ever a shining victory packed into fewer or duller words? Broke's scorn of the histrionic is shown by his reply to one of his own men who, when the Chesapeake, one blaze of fluttering colours, was bearing down upon her drab-coloured opponent, said to his commander, eyeing the bleached and solitary flag at the Shannon's peak, "Mayn't we have three ensigns, sir, like she has?" "No," said Broke, "we have always been an unassuming ship!"
And yet, this unromantic English sailor had a gleam of Don Quixote in him. On this pleasant summer morning he was waiting alone, under easy sail, outside a hostile port, strongly fortified and full of armed vessels, waiting for an enemy's ship bigger than himself to come out and fight him. He had sent in the previous day, by way of challenge, a letter that recalls the days of chivalry. "As the Chesapeake," he wrote to Laurence, its captain, "appears now ready for sea, I request that you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship." He proceeds to explain the exact armament of the Shannon, the number of her crew, the interesting circumstance that he is short of provisions and water, and that he has sent away his consort so that the terms of the duel may be fair. "If you will favour me," he says, "with any plan of signals or telegraph, I will warn you should any of my friends be too nigh, while you are in sight, until I can detach them out of the way. Or," he suggests coaxingly, "I would sail under a flag of truce to any place you think safest from our cruisers, hauling it down when fair, to begin hostilities.… Choose your terms," he concludes, "but let us meet." Having sent in this amazing letter, this middle-aged, unromantic, but hard-fighting captain climbs at daybreak to his own maintop, and sits there till half-past eleven, watching the challenged ship, to see if her foretopsail is unloosed and she is coming out to fight.