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ISAAC HULL’s orders were to get to New York as quickly as possible and report to Rodgers, but on the day war was declared, June 18, the Constitution’s crew had just begun the tedious ritual of moving a large warship down the shallow Potomac. At the Washington Navy Yard “Jumping Billy” Haraden had been on hand again to manage her repairs, and the work had proceeded at his usual breakneck pace. In two months the shipyard workers had hove her down to clean and patch her coppering, ripped out and replaced her decks, and shipped a new bowsprit and foremast. To answer Hull’s complaints about her poor sailing, Haraden had overhauled her rigging and taken off a third of her ballast. Hull also wanted sky poles rigged to carry an extra set of sails above even the royal poles that topped the topgallants to get every ounce of thrust in light winds. The ship had been towed to Alexandria when the work at the yard was done. Then came the choreographed reloading of all her heavy fittings and stores over the course of several days as she made her way down the long looping fishhook of the river to deeper waters and the Chesapeake beyond: the lighters coming alongside and transferring iron shot and casks of provisions and the new battery of two dozen thirty-two-pounder carronades for the spar deck, a ton and a half apiece.6
At Annapolis, Hull shipped more men and stores and, after firing the eighteen-gun national salute (one for each state of the union) at noon on the Fourth of July, headed down the Chesapeake Bay the next day. He wrote a short note to his father, a farewell in case:
My Ship is now underway from Annapolis and standing down to the Bay. you will ere long hear from me some where to the Northd unless I fall in with superior force in that case you may Probably hear of my being in Halifax or Bermudas … Should anything happen [to] me I leave but little but it may be sufficient to make you comfortable during your stay in this Troublesome world.
be pleased to make my love to all the Family and accept for them & your self my most fervent Prayers for your health & long life.
your Son
Isaac Hull7
The passage down the Chesapeake was constant drilling even as more men and supplies kept coming aboard. Though many of her crew had never served on a ship of war, “in a few days we shall have nothing to fear from any single-decked Ship,” Hull promised Hamilton a few days before their departure. For the seven days it took to reach the Virginia capes, Hull had the crew at quarters nine times; 1,250 cartridges were filled for the guns, 7,000 for muskets and pistols; each day the gun crews blazed away at an anchored hogshead or other targets.8
On the twelfth they put off their Chesapeake pilot and stood for the sea. Hamilton’s final instructions to Hull, written July 3, were again all caution: if Rodgers was not at New York upon his arrival, he was to remain there and await further orders. Hamilton added: “If, on your way thither, you should fall in with an enemy’s vessel, you will be guided in your proceeding by your own judgment, bearing in mind, however, that you are not, voluntarily, to encounter a force superior to your own.”
On their third day at sea, July 15, Hull ordered one of the new carronades tested by loading it with double charges and double shot and fired five times. “Found them to stand very well,” he noted. That evening the ship spoke a merchant brig from New Orleans bound for Baltimore and warned her that war with England had been declared.9
At two o’clock the next afternoon the Constitution was off Egg Harbor, near present-day Atlantic City, when four ships were sighted far off to the north and inshore. Hull was uncertain whether they were Rodgers’s squadron come south from New York to rendezvous with him or whether they were the enemy; the winds were now light from the northeast, and Hull ordered all sail made to close with the strange ships.
At four o’clock the lookout at the masthead hailed the deck: another ship was in sight off to the northeast, standing for them under all sail. The inshore ships were now visible only from the tops of the masts, and toward sunset the wind shifted around to the south, bringing the Constitution to the windward of the lone ship in the offing. Hull decided to head for her to get close enough at some point in the night, six or eight miles, to make a lantern signal and learn her identity. At 7:30 p.m. the crew went to quarters, and a half hour later Hull was standing on the forecastle staring ahead through the lowering twilight sky at the chase ahead, just off the starboard bow. He turned to the boatswain, one of a small group of officers and men who had, in the words of able seaman Moses Smith, “clustered respectfully around.”
“Adams, what do you think of that vessel?” the captain asked.
“Don’t know, sir. I can’t make her out, sir. But I think she’s an Englishman.”
“So do I. How long do you think it will take to flog her, Adams?”
“Don’t know sir! We can do it, but they’re hard fellows on salt water.”
“I know that. But don’t you think we can flog them in two hours and a half, Adams?”
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! we can do it in that time, if we can do it all.”10
The Constitution closed slowly on the stranger for the next two hours. At 10:30 p.m. they were close enough to send up the private recognition signal; three-quarters of an hour later there was still no answer from the strange ship, and Hull ordered the lanterns hauled down. A quarter moon was just dipping below the horizon to the west. Hull ordered his ship at once to haul off into the wind, southward and eastward, and wait until morning. The stranger, by now almost certainly an English frigate, did the same, dogging their course about two miles off their lee side.
Through the night the men remained at quarters, the gun crews allowed to sleep by their battle stations, though there was little sleep to be had. “That night every man on board the Constitution was wide awake,” said Moses Smith, who was on the crew of gun number 1, closest to the bow. Smith lay next to his gun, stretched out on the bare deck, his sponger and rammer at his side “ready for use at a moment’s notice.” At 4:00 a.m. the quiet of the sleepless night was broken by two signal guns being fired from the enemy ship and then a rocket arcing into the sky. And then the faint predawn light disclosed their companion of the night just within gunshot, still on their lee quarter. Directly astern, strung out in a line from six to ten miles behind, were a ship of the line, three frigates, a brig, and a schooner. All were flying English colors, and all were coming up very fast on a fine breeze that filled their sails.
The closest British frigate would turn out to be the Guerriere, whose captain, James R. Dacres, had become notorious for his zeal in pressing sailors out of merchantmen up and down the American coast. As Lieutenant Charles Morris was taking in the helplessness of the situation from the Constitution’s deck, he watched to his surprise as the Guerriere first tacked away, then apparently reversed her decision and wore around to her original course to continue in pursuit. The maneuver wasted ten minutes; it would later come out that Dacres’s signals to the other British ships had gone unanswered, and he had momentarily feared he had stumbled into Rodgers’s squadron instead of his own.11
Then the breeze began to fall away entirely from the Constitution, even as it perversely continued to favor the ships astern. As she lost even the two knots’ steerageway needed for her helm to answer, she began to fall off helplessly from the wind, her head slowly turning toward her pursuers. Hull immediately ordered the ship’s boats lowered to tow the ship’s head around into the wind, directly southward, and with the men straining at the oars, they began to inch the ship forward. The Guerriere and two of the other British frigates, Shannon and Belvidera, did the same. On the Constitution two 24-pounder guns were run out through the stern windows of the captain’s cabin while on the deck above carpenters quickly sawed through the taffrail to make openings for two more guns to fire straight aft; the bow chaser, the sole long gun mounted on the spar deck, was run aft while Moses Smith’s twenty-four-pounder from the gun deck, all six thousand pounds, was hoisted up to join it. At 7:00 a.m., as Smith stood a few feet away, Hull himself took the match in his hand, ordered the quartermaster to ho
ist the American colors, and fired the first shot from the number 1 gun.
Neither Constitution’s shot nor the return fire that quickly came from the British frigates hit its mark, but it was clear that the American ship’s situation was desperate. Shannon, the foremost of her pursuers, had nearly all the boats of the squadron now towing her while the men aboard the ship manned sweeps out the ports. “It soon appeared that we must be taken, and that our Escape was impossible … and not the least hope of a breeze to give us a chance of getting off by out sailing them,” Hull recalled. He was ready to turn the ship broadside and make a last stand against the entire squadron when Morris recollected a technique he had frequently been obliged to perform as lieutenant on the President—owing “to the timidity of my old commander,” who was reluctant to sail into and out of harbors. The technique, called kedging, involved rowing out an anchor ahead of the ship on a long line, dropping it, and then having the men haul in the line to propel the ship forward by brute force. Morris said they had been able to get speeds of three miles an hour this way. Hull immediately told him to try it—though not without adding, in Seaman Smith’s recollection, “But I imagine you’ll fail.”
Kedging generally only worked in shallow water, and a sounding revealed they were in twenty-four fathoms, 144 feet, which was pushing their luck; but the launch and first cutter were immediately sent ahead with the anchor, and every piece of line five inches and upward was bent on, making nearly a half mile of cable. It was a superb piece of seamanship, the anchor tripped up as the ship passed over it while a second anchor had meanwhile been carried ahead on a second line. Soon the distance from their pursuers began to widen. When a small breeze sprang up, the Guerriere ranged up on the American’s lee quarter and fired a broadside, but all the shot fell short, evoking a derisive cheer from the Constitution.
Aboard the Shannon, James Brown, an American merchant captain whose ship had been taken and burned a few days before, watched what was happening on the American frigate through a spyglass and realized at once what the crew was up to. The Shannon’s captain, Philip Broke, was the senior officer of the squadron, and he chatted confidently with his officers about the certainty that the Constitution would soon be theirs; Broke had even already appointed a prize officer and crew to man her. But Brown, now with equal confidence, announced to the British officers, “Gentlemen, you’ll never take that frigate.”12 He kept the reason to himself, and it would be two hours before the British at last recognized, and tried to imitate, the “Yankee trick” that was beginning to unfold ahead.
All day the slow-motion chase continued to the southwest. At ten o’clock in the morning Hull sent men down to the hold to start two thousand gallons of water from the casks, ten tons let flooding into the hold and then pumped out, enough to raise the ship one inch out of the water.
A light wind played teasingly like a cat’s paw from the southeast. Whenever it sprang up, the Constitution called in her boats, hauling them up on temporary tackles suspended from spars boomed out over the water, the men still in their places, leaning on their oars, “ready to act again at a moment’s notice,” said Morris. At two in the afternoon Belvidera was now leading the pack of pursuers, and the boats from all four British frigates and the ship of the line, eight or ten of them, converged on her, towing to get her to windward and in range to fire a few crippling shots that would halt their quarry while the rest of the squadron came up. The ships exchanged shots with their chasers, the four stern guns on Constitution firing back at maximum range. From the deck, the Constitution’s surgeon, Amos Evans, was watching Belvidera through a spyglass when he saw one of the Constitution’s all-but-spent shot come aboard and scatter a group of officers crowded on the forecastle.
All through the night the chase went on. The first half of the night the boats were out again, kedging and towing, four more hours of backbreaking work.
Dawn of the eighteenth came to reveal the Belvidera on Constitution’s lee bow, Guerriere and Shannon nearly abeam, and the smallest of the frigates, the thirty-two-gun Aeolus, to the eastward, on her weather quarter. The ship of line, brig, and schooner followed two miles astern. The winds were now steady though still light, and at around four in the morning Belvidera tacked eastward on a course that would intercept the Constitution’s current course in less than an hour. Hull’s choice was to let that happen or tack and risk the fire from Aeolus, and as the lesser of the evils Hull tacked. Aeolus hauled as close to the wind as she could to try to outreach Constitution and cut off her escape. It was now a slow-motion race to see which would cross the other’s track first. For the next half hour the bearings of the enemy ships on each side of Constitution’s deck slowly edged aft. As the Constitution slipped past the Aeolus, the two ships passing on their opposite tacks just within gunshot, Aeolus did nothing—perhaps, said Hull, out of fear that firing her guns would stun her wind and becalm her in the light breeze—and the Constitution weathered her, the British ship tacking in her wake to follow.
Now all of the Constitution’s pursuers were astern or on her lee quarter, and it was a pure sailing match. In another tour de force of seamanship, the launch and first cutter were hoisted on board while the ship was under way, not pausing a second, “with so little loss of time or change of sails that our watching enemies could not conceive what disposition was made of them,” according to an account Morris later heard from an American lieutenant who was a prisoner in the British squadron and saw it all. The skysails Hull had specially requested were now set, the pumps were at work spraying jets of sea water through the fire hoses to keep the sails wetted and drawn tight, and all the efforts put into improving the Constitution’s trim and sailing abilities now told. At nine in the morning an American merchant ship appeared on Constitution’s weather beam, and immediately the nearest British frigate hoisted American colors to decoy her in; Hull responded with the perfectly matched ruse de guerre of hoisting British colors, and the merchantman hauled wind and quickly made her escape. By noon the Constitution was making ten knots in the freshening breeze, by two o’clock twelve and a half knots, with the wind abeam. “Our hopes began to overcome apprehension,” said Morris. A squall tore through at six in the evening, and when it passed, the Constitution had gained a mile; she was now eight miles ahead.
Another night passed with the men and officers still at quarters. At dawn the next day only three of the British ships could be seen from the masthead, the nearest twelve miles off. All hands were again set to manning the pumps and wetting the sails, and at 8:15 a.m. the lead British ship hauled her wind to the northward and gave over the chase. In a few minutes all were out of sight. The men of the Constitution had been at quarters for sixty hours straight.
The next day Captain Hull sat down in his cabin to write Secretary Hamilton a long explanation of why he regretfully could no longer obey his orders for New York, concluding:
… the Enemy’s Squadron stationed off New York, which would make it impossible for the Ship to get in there, I determined to make for Boston to receive your further orders, and I hope that my having done so will meet with your approbation. My wish to explain to you as clearly as possible, why your orders have not been executed, and the length of time the Enemy were in chase of us with various other circumstances, has caused me to make this communication much longer than I would have wished, yet I cannot (in justice to our brave Officers, and crew under my Command) close it without expressing to you the confidence I have in them, and assuring you that their conduct whilst under the Guns of the Enemy was such as might have been expected from American Officers and Seamen.
I have the Honour to be &c. Isaac Hull13
THE UNITED States frigate Constitution made her way against a contrary wind, beating up tack on tack for Boston lighthouse. The night had been cold, foggy, and wet, but it was now a clear, bright Sunday morning, the twenty-sixth of July, and from her deck surgeon Amos Evans noted with pleasure the “very romantic and picturesque” country surrounding the bay: round smooth hills,
small villages, neat farms. In the distance the church steeples of Boston and the dome of the state-house marked their destination.
The next day Evans went into town; the ship’s purser had gone ahead in the pilot boat to arrange for provisions, and news of the Constitution’s safe arrival had already spread like wildfire. “The people of Boston with whom the Constitution and her Commander are both favorites, appear overjoyd at our arrival, as they had confidently expected we were taken by the British squadron,” Evans wrote in his journal that day. “So confident were the people of this place that we had been taken and carried to Halifax that a friend of one of our officers had forwarded letters of credit for him to that place.… They cheered Capt. Hull as he passd up State Street about 12 o’clock.”
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