Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Because Adams was summering in Quincy, ten miles south of Boston, Talbot was in a position to lobby the president in person. On the morning of the fourteenth, the Constitution’s barge transported him from Nantasket Roads to Braintree, a passage of less than eight miles. A short ride delivered him in person to the doorstep at Peacefield. The stratagem succeeded. In a long conference in the president’s parlor, Talbot reviewed his career and pressed his claim. Without allowing Truxtun a similar opportunity, Adams decided in Talbot’s favor. The captain returned to his ship with his commission signed and dated by the president’s own hand.

  Right or wrong, the decision got the Constitution to sea. “After a detention of nine days by contrary winds,” Adams wrote Stoddert on July 23, “the Constitution took advantage of a brisk breeze, and went out of the harbor and out of sight this forenoon, making a beautiful and noble figure amidst the joy and good wishes of thousands of good federalists.” Although his decision on Talbot’s rank was “irrevocable,” he added, he hoped Truxtun would not resign. “Far be it from me to depreciate the merits, services, or talents of Captain Truxtun. I respect, I esteem, and, especially since his late glorious action, I love the man.”

  Truxtun had taken the Constellation to New York, where her battery of 24-pounder long guns was being replaced with 18-pounders and 32-pounder carronades. On August 1, he received Stoddert’s letter informing him of the president’s decision. Stoddert urged him to “Take at least one day to consider before you answer this Letter,” but Truxtun mailed his commission back to Philadelphia the same afternoon. Shortly afterward, he told the officers of the Constellation: “It as little becomes my character to yield my rank…as it would my Ship to an enemy unequal in force. I have therefore thought proper to quit.”

  Truxtun set out on the half-day overland journey to Pleasant View, his estate in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. His house stood at the end of a long driveway lined with Lombardy poplars, surrounded with gardens that sloped down to the shore of Raritan Bay, with views across the water to Staten Island and the lighthouse at Sandy Hook. He told his friends he was reconciled to a peaceful retirement ashore, at home with his large family. With the Insurgente prize settlement added to his already considerable fortune, he was rich enough to live the rest of his life without earning another dollar.

  Within days, however, Truxtun began to regret his abrupt decision. Having spent more than half his adult life at sea, he felt oppressed by the quiet, domestic routines of his country estate. “I must confess,” he told a friend, “that it mortifies me to be Idle in a moment like the present, when every mind and every hand should be employed to save our country.” In August, Truxtun learned that another French frigate had been seen at sea and might be in the vicinity of the American coast. In letters to friends and acquaintances, the former captain poured out his resentments against Adams and Talbot, but he also expressed a desire to “have another touch at those Frenchmen.”

  Secretary Stoddert was willing to have his best commander back in the service. From Philadelphia he wrote to say that Truxtun’s resignation had never been formally accepted, and that his commission could be returned to him at any time. Letters arrived at Perth Amboy from friends and colleagues, urging him to reconsider. In September, George Washington invited him to visit Mount Vernon. No record was made of their conversation, but Truxtun afterward hinted that he would return to duty if asked.

  In October, Stoddert offered Truxtun a choice of two commands: He could have the USS President, still on the stocks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, almost ready for launch. She would be a powerful 44-gun ship, built on similar lines to the Constitution and the United States. Alternatively, the captain could resume command of the Constellation, which was back in Norfolk, and almost ready to sail for the West Indies. His commission would be returned to him without loss of seniority, and the secretary promised that the Constellation would not serve on the same station at the Constitution, so that Truxtun’s hated rival, Silas Talbot, could never command him.

  As tempting as the President was—she was larger and more powerful than Constellation—the new frigate would not sail until late spring at the earliest, and Truxtun was impatient to get back to sea. He caught a coasting sloop for Hampton Roads and reassumed command of the familiar Constellation in late November. No record was made of any speech he gave to the crew, but he might as well have repeated the words he had used the previous June: “On the ocean is our field to reap fresh laurels. Let the capstan, then, be well-manned, trip cheerfully our anchor, spread the sails, give three cheers, and away to hunt up our enemies, as we have done before, until we find them.” On Christmas Day, 1799, the Constellation cleared Cape Henry and stretched away to the south, once again bound for St. Kitts.

  A PASSAGE OF TWENTY-SIX DAYS brought the Constellation into the now familiar waters of the Lesser Antilles. On January 20, 1800, she came to anchor in Basseterre Roads. Moored securely in the harbor were most of the vessels of the Leeward Islands Squadron, now under Truxtun’s sole command: the John Adams, the Adams, the Baltimore, the Pickering, and the Eagle.

  The presence of so many American men-of-war in the port was not a welcome sight. Stoddert’s orders had dwelled on the importance of keeping the squadron “constantly cruising,” because the sea-lanes could only be made safer by vessels actively patrolling at sea. “You cannot be too adventurous,” Stoddert had written. “We have nothing to fear but from want of enterprise.” The secretary had also urged Truxtun to dispatch the vessels to cruise independently, rather than in groups or pairs, so that they could patrol a wider expanse of sea. “Nothing fills the President with more disgust,” he had warned, “than the paragraphs frequently seen in our Papers giving an account of three or four of our Vessels having sailed from some port in the West Indies on a cruise…when there is no prospect of meeting an Enemy equal to the smallest of them.”

  Shortly after arriving at St. Kitts, Truxtun received intelligence that two French warships were anchored at Guadeloupe—a 44-gun frigate and a 28-gun corvette. He planned to take the Constellation into the offing and “give them a fair challenge to come out” and do battle. The ship was heavily laden with stores, lumber, and provisions for the squadron, and these had to be transferred to Clarkson’s Yard in town. Truxtun was confident, verging even on boastfulness. He ordered the Constellation’s carpenter to clear the orlop deck of every extraneous item, and “not to leave a rope yarn in the way, as in one week…he was determined to have five hundred prisoners on board.”

  Constellation sailed from St. Kitts on January 30, with the ship “in excellent trim for sailing,” and tacked into the unceasing southeast trade winds. The next morning she hailed L’Insurgente, Captain Alexander Murray, escorting a convoy of merchantmen to the north. There were very few sails on the horizon that afternoon, but as the sun rose on February 1, the lookout caught sight of a big ship about two leagues distant in the southeast. Truxtun at first assumed she was an English frigate, and the Constellation hoisted the British ensign; but the stranger continued on her course, made no attempt to answer signals, and flashed out studding sails in an apparent attempt to gain speed. Truxtun studied her for a while through his long glass, and concluded that “she was a heavy French frigate mounting at least 54 guns.”

  He was right. The stranger was the powerful frigate La Vengeance, 54 guns. In addition to her regular crew of 320, she carried 80 passengers (mainly French soldiers), 36 American prisoners, and a large sum of money. She was homeward-bound for France, and her captain, F. M. Pitot, had no wish to meet any enemy man-of-war. He put his ship before the wind and packed on sail, hoping to stay ahead in a long run to leeward.

  Constellation cleared for action and continued in hot pursuit through freshening winds in the afternoon, proceeding with “every inch of canvas being set, that could be of service.” Evening came on, the battle lanterns were lit, and the Constellation continued gaining on the chase. The hands remained at their battle stations for twelve consecutive hours. They talked in low
voices, ran their guns in and out, tested the handspikes, and a few passed the hours “combing out their hair like Spartan sons of old.” An hour after darkness had fallen, the Constellation reached extreme hailing range, and Truxtun took a speaking trumpet forward to the lee gangway. At about eight o’clock, he leaned over the rail and shouted at Pitot “to demand the surrender of his ship to the United States of America.”

  The hail was answered by a cannon fired through the Frenchman’s stern ports, and Truxtun abandoned the attempted parley. The Constellation did not return fire immediately, as Truxtun wanted to get the ship into a position from which the entire broadside would bear on the enemy. Orders were sent forward to all the division commanders “not to throw away a single charge of powder and shot, but to take good aim, and fire directly into the Hull of the enemy…to cause or suffer no noise or confusion whatever; but to load and fire as fast as possible, when it could be done with certain effect.”

  La Vengeance hauled her wind and came up on a larboard tack, her guns bearing on Constellation, and fired a broadside. Her guns were aimed high, at the Constellation’s rigging. Constellation also turned into the wind, took a parallel course to the enemy, and ranged up on her quarter. A half moon hung low in the west. Visibility was poor: each ship appeared to the other as a vague shape across the water.

  As Constellation’s guns came to bear, at a range of about 300 yards, Captain Truxtun gave the order to fire. It was a well-aimed, double-shotted broadside. La Vengeance responded, and then the gun crews on both ships continued firing and reloading as quickly as they could. There was little maneuvering. The frigates ran on parallel courses, trading broadsides from middle range, pounding each other relentlessly. It was, Truxtun wrote, “as sharp an action as ever was fought between two frigates.”

  La Vengeance was larger and heavier than L’Insurgente, and Constellation carried lighter cannon than she had in the earlier encounter. Under the French vessel’s heavy fire, Constellation took severe punishment, particularly to her rigging. Her foresails were completely shot away, and the American ship lost the ability to maneuver while her crew worked to rig new stays. La Vengeance made sail and attempted to escape; the Constellation chased and resumed a battle of running broadsides. Twice the ships seemed on the verging of coming into contact, and both captains called for boarding parties. At a critical point in the action, said a witness aboard the Constellation, Captain Pitot “manned his rigging and quarters, to have boarded us,” but the small arms fire of the American marines and topmen “so well received them, that [the French crew] fell back and damned the cause.”

  An hour into the battle, the French vessel’s decks were strewn with dead and wounded. Captain Pitot had his speaking trumpet shot out of his hand—the ball continued past him and took off the arm of a lieutenant standing nearby. It is possible (reports are contradictory) that Pitot attempted to surrender, but in the darkness it was not clear whether the Tricolor had been struck, and the action continued.

  At one o’clock in the morning, five hours after the first shot was fired, the French ship was silenced. Truxtun assumed she had surrendered. At that moment, however, the Constellation’s mainmast, which had been struck many times by cannon fire, was on the verge of going by the board. Most of the stays and shrouds that supported it had been shot away. Attention now turned to saving the mast: the crew raced to rig stoppers, and tried to repair the damaged shrouds and get up temporary stays—but the frigate was rolling on the sea, and the mast was losing its footing. Finally it broke, just above the deck, and fell over the side, into the sea, among a raft of wreckage. The topmen went with it, and all but one were drowned. Among the dead was thirteen-year-old Midshipman James Jarvis of New York. On the deck, a marine was caught beneath the mast as it fell. He was pinned under it, and could not be rescued for several hours. The Constellation was now, said surgeon Isaac Henry, “the most perfect wreck you ever Saw.”

  The moon had set, and the night was nearly pitch-black. A few hours after the battle, the lights of the Frenchman’s lanterns could be seen in the distance, but she soon disappeared from view. At four in the morning, her signal guns were heard. Several hours were required to clear the wreckage on the Constellation’s deck, the men hacking at it with their hatchets and allowing most of the ruined spars, sailcloth, and rigging to slip over the side.

  The injured Constellation had little hope of making any progress to windward, and St. Kitts was now 150 miles upwind. Truxtun ordered a course set for Jamaica, 700 miles to the west, beyond the hostile islands of San Domingo and Cuba. The frigate’s casualties amounted to fifteen dead and twenty-five wounded. In the aftermath of the battle, Isaac Henry performed six “Amputations of Limbs” and treated “a number of very severe flesh wounds.” All thought of La Vengeance was now pushed aside as Truxtun’s chief concern was to save his jury-rigged ship and the lives of his exhausted crew.

  The long run down to Jamaica took a week. Not until February 8 did the injured frigate creep into Port Royal, where the British gave them “a kind and friendly reception.” Admiral Hyde Parker came aboard the Constellation as a guest. Nine severely wounded men were transferred to the hospital on shore.

  Still there was no word of the fate of the French ship. “It is hard to conjecture,” Truxtun wrote Stoddert, “whether she sunk, or whether she got into St. Thomas or Curacao. If she is still above water, she must be irreparable in the West-Indies. Her loss of men must have been prodigious in an action of five hours, with 600 men on board. My fire was directed principally at her hull.” Several of the Constellation’s officers believed they had seen the French vessel sinking. Her pumps had been working hard when she parted company with the Constellation.

  Truxtun and his officers oversaw the repairs to their ship. The most pressing was the replacement of the mainmast. Stores and supplies were in short supply in the West Indies, however, and the British could not or would not spare an extra spar. The repair of a Yankee frigate was not a priority. Constellation would have to make her way back to an American port under a jury-rig. She sailed from Jamaica on March 1, a week after the action, with a convoy of fourteen American merchantmen in her wake.

  Not until the Constellation was safely home in Hampton Roads did Truxtun learn the fate of La Vengeance. As he had guessed, she had made for the Dutch island of Curacao, off the coast of modern-day Venezuela. The action had left her in a sinking condition, with six feet of water in her hold and an estimated two hundred shot holes in her hull. Civilian passengers were employed in bailing water from the ship, some armed with “buckets and wooden bowls.” The American prisoners, who had been permitted to go below during the fighting, helped pump the water out and plug the shot holes. La Vengeance limped across the Gulf of Mexico “in a most distressed situation, without a Mast standing except the lower Fore and Mizen Masts, and not an original rope to be seen except the fore and bobstay that was not knotted or spliced.”

  Arriving at Curacao, Pitot deliberately ran his disabled ship onto the beach near town rather than attempt to navigate the entrance to the harbor. Eyewitness reports described the French ship as “shattered”—her shrouds and ratlines “were cut up so, you could scarce see any of them for stoppers. In short, there appears no place that has escaped a shot.” Her remaining masts were “perforated with round and double-headed shot in such a manner as to surprise a person how they could hold together.” In thanks to the American prisoners who had helped save the ship, Captain Pitot allowed them to go free.

  Though La Vengeance was slightly smaller than Constellation by tonnage, she mounted a significantly heavier broadside: a total of 559 pounds versus 372 pounds in combined weight of metal. The Constellation had engaged an adversary that outgunned her by some 50 percent, but the French had suffered far worse in the fight. Captain Pitot reported 28 killed and 40 wounded, but some reports in Curacao estimated the combined casualties at 160. If true, La Vengeance had suffered four casualties for every one suffered by the Constellation. This could be attributed, i
n part, to the traditional French tactical preference for firing high into the rigging rather than into the hull. But the efficiency and speed with which the American gun crews did their work was the most critical factor. By Captain’s Pitot’s own account, La Vengeance had discharged 742 rounds in the course of the action, while the Constellation, with fewer guns, had discharged a total of 1,229. The American gun crews had worked twice as fast as their adversaries.

  CAPTAIN TRUXTUN’S RECEPTION was much as it had been the year before. Banquets, songs, toasts, poems greeted the officers and enlisted men of the Constellation. Few questioned that the ship was the victor even if the enemy had escaped. Congress voted to cast a gold medal for Truxtun.

  Republicans, however, charged that Truxtun had endangered prospects of a negotiated peace, and even some supporters of the navy believed that Quasi War operations should be confined to providing convoys and protecting commerce, not to seeking out battle with French men-of-war. The battering of La Vengeance, the Aurora editorialized, was a “hideous transaction.” “Whence comes this madness for killing foreigners and for getting one’s fellow countrymen killed,” Pierre du Pont de Nemours asked Jefferson, “when it is evident that both nations are reconciled or arbitrating?”

  Hampton Roads was crowded with frigates, each in need of attention from the overworked Gosport Navy Yard. The Norfolk-built Chesapeake had been launched the previous December, and her mostly bare hull was anchored in the Elizabeth River. L’Insurgente had recently arrived from the West Indies, having sprung her foremast in a storm off Cuba. And on February 24, a month before the arrival of the Constellation, the Portsmouth-built Congress had crept into the lower Roads, storm-beaten and completely dismasted, without a single spar standing. Her officers were feuding openly and her crew was verging on mutiny.