Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  On the afternoon of June 19, three British frigates sailed up the channel to Hampton Roads with orders to attack shipping in the James River. In the evening the wind subsided, and the frigates were left becalmed, with one, the 38-gun Junon, about three miles away from her consorts. At 11:00 p.m., fifteen American gunboats in two divisions dropped down the Elizabeth and took up a crescent formation around the lone British ship. The Second Division was manned with officers and crew of the Constellation. Half an hour before dawn, they began (according to Captain John Cassin’s report) a “heavy, galling fire on [the Junon] at about three quarters of a mile distance.” The barrage continued for forty-five minutes. It ended when a breeze came up that allowed the Junon’s consorts to be brought up into action, and the gunboats prudently withdrew. Cassin was sure the Junon must have suffered badly in the attack, but in fact she had lost only one marine killed and three seamen wounded, with “several shot in our hull and some of the standing and running rigging cut.” The Americans lost a petty officer aboard gunboat No. 139 when an 18-pounder shot fired from the Junon “passed through him & lodged in the mast.”

  As this indecisive action was coming to a close, British reinforcements moved up to the Roads—thirteen sail in all, including four ships of the line, four frigates, two sloops and three transports. They anchored north of Craney Island, safely out of range of the shore guns, and prepared their boats—about fifteen altogether—for a frontal attack on the island. At the first light of dawn, the Americans saw British troops disembarking on the western shore, near Pig’s Point, two miles north of the island. The Constellation’s crew hauled several of the 18-pounders across the island, to a breastwork closest to the landward side where they could be brought to bear on the troops advancing along the shore. Ammunition and powder was brought in boats from the Constellation.

  The engagement began as the men of the Royal Marine Artillery fired a series of Congreve rockets from a farmhouse on shore. All fell onto the sand. Two of the American cannon soon destroyed the farmhouse and drove the attackers back. Colonel Beckwith, commanding the British troops advancing along the shore, withdrew out of range of the American guns. Several of his men were killed or wounded by the artillery fire, and about twenty-five deserters melted away into the surrounding pine forest.

  During these rocket and artillery exchanges, one of the British boats advanced to the northern shore of Craney Island to take soundings, while the others hung back, awaiting a signal. An American witness admired the “extreme daring” of the men in that first boat. “A brisk fire was kept upon his boat, and a shower of shot fell close to and around her, yet none appear to strike her.” She returned to the British flagship, and soon afterward all fifteen boats set sail, advancing in a line abreast on the island. The British crews cheered loudly and repeatedly, and were answered by the American defenders. The lead boat was the Centipede, Admiral Warren’s magnificent personal barge, a 50-foot vessel rowed by twenty-four immaculately dressed oarsmen and armed with a bow-mounted brass 3-pounder known as a “grasshopper.” During the attack, Centipede was commanded by Captain John Hanchett of HMS Diadem, who held an umbrella over his head in a gesture of contempt for the Americans. A small terrier, apparently belonging to one of the officers, sat in the bow.

  The gun crews on the island waited patiently, until the barges were well within range. When the order came to open fire, their concentrated volleys of grape and canister shot cut the attackers to pieces. “[T]he Officers of the Constellation fired their 18 pounder more like riflemen than Artillerists,” Cassin reported. “I never saw such shooting and seriously believe they saved the Island yesterday.” Most of the British boats grounded on the shoals, about 300 yards from the beach. The Centipede was cut in half by a direct hit from a heavy round shot. One of the crew, a Frenchman, had both his legs shot off; Captain Hanchett was hit by a canister shot in the thigh, and “kept on his legs as long as possible, but sunk at last from the loss of blood.” Some of the Virginia militiamen waded out into the water and shot at the swimmers, including (according to later British reports) men who were unarmed and attempting to surrender. Dozens were taken prisoner, and dozens more swam toward the mainland and the safety of the woods in the hope of deserting. The dog was saved.

  Watching at a distance from the deck of the San Domingo, Warren decided to call off the attack. In his official report, the admiral reported none killed, ten wounded, and ten missing, but the British Naval Chronicle later estimated the combined losses at ninety men. As many as forty British deserters—sailors, soldiers, and marines—crossed the lines. Both sides agreed that the American guns had sunk two British barges. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Napier of the British 102nd Regiment attributed the defeat to overconfidence: “we despise the Yankees too much.”

  Infuriated by the bloody repulse, the British troops landed on the opposite shore of the bay, near the village of Hampton, eighteen miles from Norfolk. It was a place of no military significance, defended by about 440 Virginia militiamen. The British boats shelled the town with artillery and rockets while the main body of troops marched on the town from the south. The militiamen killed five and wounded thirty-three of the attackers, but then broke ranks and ran for their lives.

  Once the defenders were driven away, the British officers were either unwilling or unable to prevent the troops from running wild. Private homes were looted; the communion plate was stolen from the Episcopal church; several soldiers found a stash of liquor and were soon blind drunk. At least one American soldier was executed after having surrendered. The French Chasseurs committed an unknown number of civilian atrocities. In two isolated farmhouses north of the village, between five and seven women were apparently raped by the Frenchmen, although reports suggested that at least one British soldier was involved, as one of the victims asserted that he was “dressed in red” and “spoke correctly the English language.” A sixty-five-year-old man who attempted to intervene to stop one of the assaults was striped naked and stabbed. Another, who was sick and unable to rise from his bed, was summarily executed. When the British re-embarked into their ships two days later, and the Virginia militia returned, they found corpses strewn on the ground, stripped of clothing and valuables. Only “the shells of houses” remained standing.

  Brigadier General Taylor, commanding the Virginia militia at Norfolk, dispatched a severely worded protest to his British counterparts. “It is important to us and the world to know what species of warfare the arms of Great Britain mean to wage,” he told Colonel Beckwith, and closed with a ringing denunciation: “Worthless is the laurel steeped in female tears.”

  Beckwith responded elusively, at first refusing to admit that any such events had occurred; next representing them as reprisals for the shooting of British swimmers off Craney Island; and finally blaming them on the Chasseurs—as if the French soldiers under his command, being French, were not his responsibility. Although Beckwith arranged to have the Chasseurs withdrawn from the North American theater, none were punished, and the British never acknowledged that crimes had been committed. Lieutenant-Colonel Napier, who served under Beckwith, confessed in his memoirs that he had been repelled by the behavior of the army at Hampton: “Every horror was perpetrated with impunity—rape, murder, pillage—and not a man was punished.”

  NEW YORKERS AGED FORTY or older had not forgotten the long, ruinous occupation of Manhattan Island by the British Army in 1776–81, when the wharves had been taken to pieces for firewood, half the population had fled into the backcountry, and two great fires (’76 and ’78) laid waste to a quarter of the city. With a strong squadron of British battleships and frigates lying to off Sandy Hook, it seemed likely that history was destined to repeat itself. There was a seemingly infinite number of vulnerable terrain features on Staten Island, Long Island, Manhattan, and New Jersey. Engineers, militiamen, sailors, and laborers worked around the clock to dig trenches, erect barricades, mount gun emplacements, and haul stones to redoubts. Eight companies of New Jersey militia camped on the
Highlands, near the beach, and were provisioned by potatoes, cider, and apples purchased from the farmers on the mainland and transported across Raritan Bay in shallow-draft skiffs. While working furiously to complete a new fort, with barracks and blockhouses, they also kept watch over the British ships and communicated their movements to New York via an optical telegraph.

  In spite of the seemingly dire threat to the city, it proved impossible to mobilize New York’s entire flotilla of gunboats, because Master Commandant Jacob Lewis could not recruit enough seamen to man them. “Although invited not one appeared,” he told Secretary Jones. The failed recruiting drive, he said, “served to prove incontrovertibly that volunteers cannot be depended on.” Having received similar reports from Baltimore, Norfolk, and Delaware Bay, Jones informed Congress a few weeks later that the gunboats could not be manned because of “the preference which Seamen naturally give to Vessels better adapted to their habits and Comfort.”

  By contrast, Commodore Stephen Decatur had no difficulty in filling the complements of the USS United States and the USS Macedonian, the latter having been repaired, overhauled, and brought into the U.S. Navy with her original name. Decatur planned to sortie through lower New York Bay with the two frigates and a sloop of war, the Hornet. Evading the British blockade, he would cruise east to Bermuda, north to the Grand Bank, and finally to Ushant, at the gateway to the English Channel, in the hope of intercepting returning East and West Indian convoys. In April and May, the British force off New York consisted of two battleships, Valiant and Ramillies, and two frigates, Acasta and Orpheus. With British topsails just off the Hook, Decatur determined to escape New York by the same route he had entered, five months earlier—through the Hell Gate passage into Long Island Sound. From there he would make a dash for the open sea by Montauk Point, the easternmost extremity of Long Island.

  On Tuesday, May 18, the three ships of Decatur’s squadron raised their anchors and sailed up the East River. On the approach to Hell Gate, United States ran aground. Though she suffered no damage in the accident, she was stranded until the next high tide. The next morning, the squadron got underway once again and stood north for the straits, passing beneath the modern-day site of the Triborough Bridge.

  The difficulty at Hell Gate was not the depth of water in the channel—there was enough, even at low tide, for the United States or any other big ship to pass safely through the straits. The danger arose from the violence of the tide and the numerous rocks and shoals lying hidden just beneath the surface. The margins of the channel were strewn with 150 years’ worth of shipwrecks. From long experience, New York pilots had learned that the best time to try the Gate was at low-water slack, because the reduced depth of water was a reasonable price to pay for the absence of current, and the most treacherous rocks were exposed to view. A contemporary pilot’s guide spelled out the instructions:

  As you run up between Flood Rock, which is steep-to, and the Point of Long Island, bear up more Easterly, keeping Mid Channel. The last Drain of Tide will show the Hogsback-dangers on your Larboard, and the Pot-Rock on your Starboard, by the uncommon Ripple and the boiling Appearance of the Water. There is sufficient Depth for large ships until you come up with Marsh Isle, where it Shoals and forms a Bar across the Channel, with only four Fathoms at the Top of High Water; and about a third of the Way over from the Isle there is a single Rock with no more than ten Feet Water.

  The squadron passed through safely, and the pilots disembarked into their boats for the return passage to New York. East of Marsh Island (not far from the modern-day site of La Guardia Airport), the United States and her consorts skirted the shoals known as the Stepping Stones and Executioner’s Rocks, and entered the safer waters of Long Island Sound, with its regular and predictable soundings. Even so, the night of the twenty-sixth brought thunder and hard rain, and a bolt of lightning struck the mainpeak of the United States, bringing down Decatur’s broad pendant. The electrical charge shot down the mast, leapt across the spar deck to one of the 24-pounder guns, traveled through the wardroom and the surgeon’s quarters (where it put out a candle and demolished a cot), tore away a few panels of the frigate’s copper bottom sheathing, and finally passed into the Sound. Twenty or thirty men stationed in the tops or on deck received a painful jolt, but none was injured. The Macedonian was following a half cable’s length astern—her watch officer, fearing the flagship’s magazine would detonate, shouted for all sails to be thrown aback. The incident did no serious harm, but it was precisely the kind of dark omen that put the sailors on edge.

  Five days after sailing from New York, the squadron anchored in the lee of Fishers Island, pausing there for five days in order to complete victualling and watering and waiting for a heavy fog to lift. Decatur had received “various information of the force of the Enemy off Montaug but were only certain of his having a line of battle ship & a frigate there.” Wary of sailing blind into the arms of a superior force, Decatur waited several days for the weather to clear, finally getting the squadron underway at dawn on June 1. At 9:00 a.m., as they were rounding Montauk Point, they came into contact with the 74-gun Valiant and the frigate Acasta about seven or eight miles to leeward.

  Even with the advantage of the wind, Decatur’s odds of evading the blockading force were diminished by the agonizing sluggishness of the United States. He might have chanced an engagement if the Valiant and Acasta were the only enemy vessels in sight, but southward progress soon revealed two more strange sails in the lee of Block Island, apparently maneuvering to cut off a potential escape into Newport. With presumed enemies closing from two directions, Decatur gave the order to haul the wind and beat back through the “Race” to New London. The chasing Acasta got within long cannon-shot range of the fleeing Americans, and fired a high-arching ball that splashed just short of the United States, but the slow-sailing flagship and her consorts (which could have outsailed her handily had they wished) put into the Thames River at two in the afternoon. Neither Valiant nor Acasta had a local pilot aboard, and neither had ever navigated through the Race. Captain Dudley Oliver of the Valiant, fearing for the safety of his ships, called off the chase and returned to the anchorage at Gardiners Island.

  Connecticut’s Thames River (it rhymes with “games,” unlike the English river for which it was named) was not an impregnable refuge. There were fortresses on each side of the river, Forts Griswold and Trumbull, but it was doubtful whether either was strong enough to withstand an attack by a 74-gun ship. Decatur took the United States, Macedonian, and Hornet above New London, and detached boatloads of seamen and marines to return down the river and strengthen the forts. Stores, guns, provisions, and water were hoisted out to lighten the frigates, enabling them to be navigated four miles further up the river to a place called Dragon Hill. On June 9, HMS Ramillies (74 guns) and HMS Orpheus (36 guns) reinforced Valiant and Acasta. The blockaders took soundings of Long Island and Block Island Sounds, plundered the coast for provisions, and moved their permanent anchorage to Fishers Island, within sight of the mouth of the Thames. Decatur expected the English to risk everything to recapture the Macedonian, “even if they followed her into a cornfield.”

  FOUR FRIGATES LAY IN BOSTON HARBOR that spring. Commodore John Rodgers, with President and Congress, had returned to Boston on the last day of 1812 from a three-month cruise in which they had encountered no enemy warships and taken only two prizes. The Constitution had returned from her victory over Java on February 27 (the sinking condition of the Java, following the battle, had obliged Captain William Bainbridge to take the prisoners on board the Constitution and burn the captured ship to the waterline). Bainbridge had been appointed commandant of the Charlestown Navy Yard, leaving the most famous frigate in the American service temporarily without a commander. Chesapeake had arrived on April 10, after a 115-day cruise in which she had passed through some of England’s busiest shipping lanes but taken only three prizes, enhancing her reputation as a star-crossed ship.

  With so many ships in port, all compet
ing for attention, the Charlestown shore establishment was once again overwhelmed. Although neither President nor Congress required major repairs, three months were consumed in refitting and reprovisioning them. Explaining the delays to the Navy Office on March 8, 1813, Commodore Rodgers blamed the weather, which “has been so intollerably cold, and the Country so covered with Ice and Snow, that we have been able to do but very little towards the Ship’s completion for sea. The mercury in the Thermometer stands today Six degrees above zero—a degree of cold scarcely ever known here at this Season.” Despite generous cash disbursements from Washington, there seemed to be a permanent shortage of money. A large proportion of the Chesapeake’s seamen had reached the end of their two-year enlistments and wanted to be paid off, but there was not enough cash on hand to pay them the wages and prize money they were owed. Captain Samuel Evans believed Chesapeake needed a new mainmast and perhaps a new mizzenmast, but Secretary Jones was absolutely determined that “not a moment should be lost” in preparing her for another cruise, and urged that she sail with her existing masts, if at all possible.

  The British squadron off Boston included the 74-gun La Hogue and the frigates Shannon, 38 guns, and Tenedos, 38. In early April, La Hogue returned to Halifax for provisions. Commodore Philip Broke of Shannon hoped to lure President and Congress out to engage Shannon and Tenedos, and conveyed verbal challenges to that effect to Rodgers by various fishing smacks and pilot boats. Either because he was determined to obey his orders to concentrate on commerce raiding, or because he suspected La Hogue was still in the bay, Rodgers would not take the bait.