Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Breaking ranks, the crew swarmed around Captain Hull, begged him to stay, gave him a thundering three cheers, and swore they would sail out and take the British flagship, the sixty-four-gun Africa, with him as their captain. But if they had to serve under Captain Bainbridge, they demanded to be transferred, at once, to any other vessel. In the midst of the uproar the ship’s armorer, Leonard Hayes, was placed under arrest and hauled off onto one of the nearby gunboats “on the charge of insolent and mutinous language.”

  Finally Bainbridge addressed the crew. He demanded to know whether there were any among them who had actually sailed with him before and refused to go with him now: “My men, what do you know about me?” It was the wrong question: they knew plenty. One after another of the men spoke up to say that they had indeed sailed with him and would not do it again if they could help it. One man declared he had been with Bainbridge on the Philadelphia “and had been badly used.” Though the man allowed “it might be altered now,” he would still prefer going with Captain Hull, “or any of the other commanders.”14

  Eighteen sentries were posted all over the ship that night, but that did not prevent two of the crew from slipping over the side and stealing the cutter to try to make a break for it. They were quickly caught when they floated past an anchored gunboat nearby and were returned to the Constitution in the morning.

  All hands were called aft, and Bainbridge for the first time in his career decided that he might gain more by not flogging a recalcitrant crewman. Addressing the assembled crew, Bainbridge proposed a deal: “I will not punish these men as they deserve if you will consent to go in the ship.” Moses Smith recalled that “this was appealing to our best feelings,” and “nearly every man consented, to save his brother sailors from punishment.” The only punishment recorded aboard the Constitution for the next two and a half months occurred a week later, and even that won Bainbridge support from the crew: a seaman named George Mitchell, ashore on liberty, was returned to the ship one afternoon by an army recruiting agent. If Mitchell had just run away he probably would still have had the crew’s sympathy, but attempting to enlist in the rival service, and pocketing the eight-dollar bounty for it, was another matter. “No one could justify him,” Smith said. He got twelve lashes, probably the mildest sentence Bainbridge had ever awarded for such an offense, too mild as far as most of the crew was concerned.15

  Hull spent the rest of the fall settling his brother’s estate and quickly proposing marriage to, and equally quickly being accepted by, a lovely, intelligent, and much-sought-after young woman from his home state of Connecticut. Ann Hart was twenty-one, just over half his age. One of her male acquaintances reported with ill-concealed jealousy that “Miss Ann Hart bestowed her hand … on Victory as personified by our little fat captain, Isaac Hull, who is now reposing in the shade of his laurels”; and Hull himself could not resist gloating in a letter to John Bullus, “I find the last frigate I had the good fortune to capture as tight a little boat as I could wish … I only wish you could have seen more of her before I took my departure. Had you I am sure you would have liked her construction.” Ann, for her part, told a friend, “What a delightful thing it must be to be the wife of a hero.”

  The only sour note to the beginning of what would prove to be thirty years of happy marriage was predictably provided by William Bainbridge. On the newlyweds’ return to Boston from New York, where Hull had been temporarily assigned for a few months before taking up his post at the Boston Navy Yard, they discovered that Mrs. Bainbridge and her children were still occupying the commandant’s house and refused to move out. The Hulls had to rent lodgings. Mrs. Hull and Mrs. Bainbridge hated each other at first sight.16

  ON SEPTEMBER 26 a report on the Exchange Coffee House books in Boston noted that Sir John Borlase Warren, Baronet, Knight of the Bath, Admiral of the Blue, had arrived in Halifax to assume command of all of His Majesty’s naval forces in the northern half of the American hemisphere. The Admiralty had decided to consolidate all four stations in British North America and the Caribbean into a single unified command; besides the 32 ships of the North American station based in Halifax, Warren was to have at his disposal the 28 ships of the Leeward Islands station based at Antigua, the 18 of the Jamaica station based at Port Royal, and the 12 of the Newfoundland station based at St. John’s—some 90 ships in all, among them 18 frigates and 5 ships of the line. Warren arrived on the seventy-four-gun San Domingo, accompanied by a second ship of the line, the seventy-four-gun Poictiers, plus two sloops of war and a schooner; two more frigates were to follow as soon as possible.17

  Warren was fifty-nine, a man of good looks and smooth manner, former ambassador to Russia, former member of Parliament; all in all, more a diplomat and politician than an admiral. He had previously served as commander in chief of the Halifax station from 1807 to 1810, sent out at that time to smooth things over with the United States after the British government had recalled Admiral Berkeley in the aftermath of the Chesapeake affair.

  Warren was the epitome of the aristocrat who had made an effortless ascent in the Royal Navy. Entered as an able seaman on the books of the ship of the line Marlborough in 1771 when he was eighteen—and actually attending Cambridge University—he did not begin serving on a naval vessel until six years later. Within a year he was a lieutenant, three years after that a captain. Warren had, however, gone on to distinguish himself as a squadron commander, in 1798 intercepting a French flotilla off the coast of Ireland that was carrying five thousand troops, a feat for which he was voted a gold medal by Parliament. But he had never commanded a force larger than a frigate squadron and had never had to deal with larger questions of naval strategy.18

  Warren came bearing both carrots and sticks. Empowered to open negotiations with the American government, he wrote at once to Secretary of State Monroe proposing an immediate cessation of hostilities based on Britain’s revocation of the orders in council.19

  He was also immediately inundated with the administrative responsibilities of managing four stations: ninety ships and twelve thousand men to supply and keep fed, complaints from merchants to be answered, chronic shortages of dockyard supplies to deal with. Then there was the avalanche of forms that the Admiralty bureaucracy constantly demanded: statistical compilations of punishments inflicted on each ship; weekly returns of the sick and wounded on His Majesty’s vessels itemized by number on the sick list, number confined to bed, number in hospitals, number discharged back to duty, and then broken down by cause—intermittent fevers, continued fevers, catarrhs, pneumonic inflammation, consumption, rheumatism, venereal disease, scurvy, ulcers, wounds and accidents, dysentery, diarrhea; preprinted grids two pages wide to be filled in for each ship listing how much bread, beer, brandy, wine, rum, beef, pork, pease, oatmeal, flour, suet, fruit, butter, cheese, rice, sugar, oil, vinegar, and water was on board, how many men short of complement each was, what condition each ship was in.20 Adding to all the paperwork was an accounting task that unmistakably occupied a good deal of Warren’s attention, filling ledger after ledger with meticulous entries tracking the value of every prize brought in to the vice admiralty courts at Halifax and Bermuda, calculating the one-twelfth share due the flag admiral, converting Halifax and Bermuda currency to sterling, deducting the prize agent’s 5 percent commission and the 5 percent of the remainder assessed to support the naval pensioners at Greenwich Hospital, and subtracting miscellaneous advances the admiral had had his prize agent in Bermuda make for house rent, printing bills, twelve dozen bottles of Champagne, a pianoforte, hire of a horse and gig, two rounds of beef, a sheep, his annual subscription to the Halifax Bible Society, pocket money. He was said to employ one clerk full-time just keeping track of his prize money accounts, and by the end of his first year of managing Great Britain’s war with America on the high seas the admiral’s take, even after deducting all those living expenses his agent had advanced, was 15,238 pounds, 16 shillings, and 2 pence—about $60,000 in 1812, the equivalent of something like $1 million to
day. He would receive another £13,602 in prize money a year and a half after that.21

  When the admiral turned his attention to running the war, he found that much of the strength of his force was illusory and many of his options were distinctly limited. His predecessor in Halifax, Vice Admiral Herbert Sawyer, had done almost nothing to prepare for war. Sawyer had waited until June 22 to return to Halifax from Bermuda, where the squadron had spent the winter, and most of his ships arrived home in a state of disrepair and well below their complement owing to sickness and desertions and a severe shortage of naval stores and trained shipwrights in Bermuda. The Halifax dockyard was in a shambles too. A proclamation offering a full pardon to any naval deserters in the Maritime Provinces who returned to duty brought few takers. Then a series of mishaps in August and September wreaked more havoc. The brig Emulous ran aground in a storm off Nova Scotia; the schooner Chub was fired on and damaged beyond immediate repair in a case of mistaken identity during a foggy night; the frigate Barbadoes struck a notorious shipwrecking bar off tiny Sable Island two hundred miles southeast of Halifax, and although her crew and £60,000 she was carrying for the dockyard payroll were saved, the ship was bashed to pieces on the beach; and a severely undermanned sloop of war, the Laura, was taken by a French privateer in a battle that left almost half the British crew dead. The small squadron that had put to sea under Broke in July—the four frigates plus the sixty-four-gun Africa that had chased the Constitution off New Jersey—represented almost the entire serviceable portion of the station’s paper strength for most of the summer.

  Hundreds of American privateers were already swarming the waters off the Maritime Provinces, and Halifax itself remained woefully undefended, but a request from Sawyer to the Newfoundland station for reinforcements was rebuffed; most of its ships were busy protecting the fishing fleet on the Grand Banks. The Caribbean stations had their own problems, not least that their available ships were similarly committed to escorting convoys and few could be spared to initiate offensive operations on the American coast.22

  In early October Warren issued a flurry of sailing orders, trying to cover as many contingencies as possible: The flagship San Domingo, in which Warren had just arrived, would cruise the Grand Banks with the Africa for the “succor and protection” of several valuable British convoys. A squadron consisting of the ship of the line Poictiers, two frigates, two sloops of war, and a schooner was ordered to the capes of the Chesapeake to protect British trade passing to and from the West Indies and gather intelligence on American naval movements. The frigates Shannon, Nymphe, and Tenedos and the brig sloop Curlew were to cruise the North Atlantic “for such time as circumstances of Wind and Weather or information may tender expedient, but taking care to return here by the 15th of November” while looking out for the convoys from Newfoundland that Rodgers’s squadron was believed to be pursuing. Several frigates and smaller ships were to bottle up Charleston harbor; the frigate Belvidera to cruise the mid-Atlantic coast of America for six weeks for “the destruction and annoyance of the Enemy”; a powerful squadron of nine ships to patrol the coast and harbors of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and “in the event of invasion” to “proceed forthwith to the point of attack with the whole of your squadron to cooperate with and aid and assist the Army.”23

  At the same time he sent his own urgent plea to the Admiralty in London for reinforcements “to enable me to meet the exertions of the Enemy, who seem to be determined to persevere in the annoyance and destruction of the commerce of Great Britain.”24 He enclosed a copy of an American privateer’s commission found on the prize master of a captured British ship retaken by the San Domingo; it was numbered 318, which seemed to fully confirm his worst apprehensions about the size of the problem he had on his hands protecting British convoys and guarding against surprise attacks on the Maritime Provinces.

  Warren’s orders authorized him to “attack, sink, burn or otherwise destroy” the commerce and navy of the United States but also instructed him to “exercise all possible forbearance” while the prospect of negotiations remained alive.25 In many ways, both sides were still treating it as a short, civilized war in the early fall of 1812. Amid all his preparations for belligerency, Warren casually dispatched the frigate Spartan to the island of Madeira in November to pick up a shipload of wine to keep the squadron supplied in its accustomed fashion.26 Monroe took an early opportunity of writing to Warren that “it is the sincere desire of the President to see (and to promote, so far as depends on the United States,) that the war which exists between our countries be conducted with the utmost regard to humanity.” And officers on both sides had gone out of their way to make honorable, even chivalric gestures to one another: Dacres’s magnanimous act of allowing the impressed Americans in the Guerriere’s crew to go below during the battle was widely noted, as was his praise of the treatment the British had received aboard the Constitution after being taken prisoner. “I feel it my duty to state,” Dacres wrote Vice Admiral John T. Duckworth in Newfoundland, “that the conduct of Captain Hull and his Officers to our Men has been that of a brave Enemy, the greatest care being taken to prevent our Men losing the smallest trifle.”27

  Arrangements for exchanging naval prisoners of war were quickly agreed to, with cartel vessels chartered to carry prisoners back to their respective countries. The agreement stipulated that prisoners on both sides would be returned without delay and established relative values for officers of different ranks: one admiral was worth 60 men, a commodore 20, a captain of a line of battle ship 15, a frigate captain 10, a lieutenant 6, a midshipman or the master of a merchant vessel 3. If the balance sheet did not even out on both sides, prisoners would still be returned promptly, in the meantime giving their parole of honor that they would not resume any naval or military duty until regularly exchanged.28 In August, when David Porter in the frigate Essex captured the British sloop of war Alert in the middle of the Atlantic about five hundred miles west of the Azores, the two captains quickly reached a gentleman’s agreement skipping the formality of having to take the British prisoners back to America at all. Porter put the Alert’s crew back on their own ship, threw their guns overboard, and accepted their parole for themselves and their ship. The agreement transformed the prize directly into a “sea cartel” that would sail to St. Johns, put the prisoners ashore, and then proceed to New York with any American prisoners released in exchange. A single lieutenant from the Essex was placed aboard the Alert to command the ship.29 This was actually playing fast and loose with the laws of war, and such a procedure was definitely not to the strategic advantage of a naval power like Britain that enjoyed such a huge numerical advantage of force: Admiral Duckworth wrote to Secretary Hamilton protesting the arrangement “in the strongest manner,” pointing out that it not only relieved the capturing vessel of the burden of her prisoners without having to break her cruise or even diminish her crew by manning the prize, but also secured the prize against recapture, since it was now effectively sailing under a flag of truce. Duckworth noted that to be properly recognized as a cartel, a ship first needed to enter a port of the nation by which she had been captured.

  Nevertheless, the admiral continued, he was prepared to honor the agreement as a token of British goodwill:

  I am willing to give proof at once of my respect for the liberality with which the captain of the Essex has acted, in more than one instance towards the British subjects who have fallen into his hands; of the sacred obligation that is always felt, to fulfill the engagements of a British officer; and of my confidence in the disposition of his royal highness the prince regent, to allay the violence of war by encouraging a reciprocation of that courtesy by which its pressure upon individuals may be so essentially diminished.30

  The Alert subsequently arrived in New York as agreed, carrying 232 released American prisoners.31

  But even in the first months of the fighting, humanity was already beginning to fray against the inevitable rough friction of war. On September 11 a cartel arrived in B
oston with the crew of the brig Nautilus, which had been captured July 16 off New Jersey, the first American navy ship taken in the war. They had several stories to tell of the less-than-chivalric treatment American prisoners had received in Halifax. One midshipman, manning a prize that was recaptured by a British frigate, had his sword taken from him by the captain, who then stamped on it, threw it overboard, and said, “There’s one damn Yankee sword gone.” Both sides traded accusations of attempts to “seduce” their prisoners to desert and join the other’s navy.

  Much more seriously, six of the crew of the Nautilus had been detained in Halifax and were not returned with the other exchanged Americans. Claiming that the men were British subjects, Captain Broke ordered them sent to England for examination and possible trial on a charge of bearing arms against the king, which was treason, punishable by death.32 Commodore Rodgers learned of this just as the cartel ship was leaving Boston harbor on its way back to Halifax with the prisoners of the Guerriere; he sent a boat to halt the ship and took off twelve of the British prisoners in retaliation, announcing that they would be held hostage and subjected to whatever fate the Americans were.

  The British chargé d’affaires protested this “outrage,” and Warren sent a warning of his own directly to Monroe threatening retaliation against any repetition of Rodgers’s “extremely reprehensible” conduct.

  The admiral added, however, that it was “still very much my wish … during the continuance of the differences existing between the two countries to adopt every measure that might render the effect of war less rigorous.”33

  IN LITTLE over a month of solo cruising, the Essex under David Porter’s command had taken eight enemy merchant ships and a sloop of war, amply affirming the wisdom of dispersing the small American naval force for maximum “annoyance” of the enemy. Porter estimated that along with the 424 prisoners he captured, he had taken or destroyed property worth $300,000.34 In taking the Alert he had been able to decoy the smaller British ship by a ruse de guerre of discreetly throwing out two drags astern while sending a few men aloft to put on a disorganized show of trying to shake out the reefs in the topsails, looking for the world like an undermanned merchantman trying to make a desperate getaway. The crew went to quarters and cleared for action but kept their gunports closed until the Alert came within range, whereupon Porter ran up the American ensign, the gunports flew open, and the Essex fired a broadside, shooting the tampions out of the end of the guns along with the first round. The Alert struck in eight minutes. Of course it was an uneven contest, but it also showed what a single frigate sailing alone could do.35 Upon his arrival at the mouth of the Delaware in early September, Porter wrote Bainbridge, “I hope however to have another slap at them ere long that will gall them still more.”36