With the example of Constitution and Essex before them, both Bainbridge and Rodgers wrote Secretary Hamilton reiterating the advantage of having the American frigates sail singly to strike most effectively at the enemy’s commerce. “It will at the same time afford now and then an opportunity to our Frigates and theirs, of falling in singly, to our advantage,” added Rodgers. Bainbridge promised the secretary that by ordering the ships to venture out individually “you would occasionally hear glad tidings of us,” whereas “if we are kept together in squadron … the whole are scarcely of more advantage than one ship would be.” Rodgers thought that there might be a benefit in keeping in small squadrons while leaving port and separating once at sea to confuse the British as to the disposition and intentions of the American force, and Hamilton agreed to that suggestion. He ordered Rodgers in the President, Bainbridge in the Constitution, and Decatur in the United States to form their squadrons by selecting, in order of seniority, one of the smaller frigates from among the Congress, Chesapeake, and Essex; each would also be assigned a small brig to complete his squadron.37
But Hamilton left it entirely up to the three senior captains to decide where they would cruise, which while satisfying their personal inclinations for independence abandoned any attempt at strategic planning or coordination of the fight at a higher level; Hamilton did not even suggest that the captains consult with one another to make sure their plans did not conflict. And so each absurdly kept his intentions a secret from the others.
While the Constitution awaited the completion of her repairs at the Charlestown Navy Yard, Bainbridge wrote his old friend William Jones of Philadelphia asking for advice on where the best pickings might be had. Jones replied with a long letter, promising to forward a copy of Elmores Indian Directory, which included details on the sailing schedules and routes of the British East India trade, and drawing on his own expertise as a shipping merchant and captain to recommend six cruising grounds best suited “for intercepting the British trade.” Jones thought Rodgers had erred in his recent cruise by being too far north along the meridian of the Azores; the West India fleets tended to pass to the south of the tail of the Grand Banks to avoid the fog and pass near the Azores before turning to the north after passing east of the islands, and “from one or two degrees North” of the Azores “is an excellent position.” Other promising spots were along the coast of Portugal, on the track of convoys between Britain and Gibraltar; off Cape Canaveral, where “in the outer verge of the Stream you intercept to a certainty everything from Jamaica through the Gulph and have the ports of Georgia and the Carolinas near you”; the Crooked Island passage in the Bahamas, “to intercept trade from the East end of Jamaica”; and the coast of Brazil, “with which the British drive a valuable trade and the returns are very frequently in a very convenient Commodity Viz Gold Bars and Coin and other compact valuables.” Jones added that “a Brilliant Cruize ought no doubt be made in the Indian seas, but for the distance and absolute deprivation of a Single friendly Port to refit in Case of Accidents to which you would be much exposed”; on balance there was probably “too much of chance and responsibility to warrant the enterprize with so important a part of our Gallant little Navy.”38
The Constitution had sustained significant damage to her spars and rigging that needed the full attention of the navy yard, but all the ships that had come into Boston needed resupplies of provisions and stores as well. Complete supplies for even one of the smaller frigates included twenty tons of bread in a hundred casks, ten tons of beef and ten tons of pork in another hundred barrels each, three thousand gallons of rum, two tons of cheese, six tons of flour and cornmeal, two tons of rice, and eighty barrels of potatoes. There was coal for the galley stove and forge, five hundred pounds of musket balls, a thousand flints, a hundred pounds of slow match, seventy cartridge bags and like numbers of round shot and grapeshot or canister shot and several hundred pounds of powder for every gun. There were huge lists of supplies and spare parts that every ship needed to keep on hand and well stocked at all times to deal with the emergencies that arose at sea, everything from fifty pounds of 20d nails to caulking mallets and rasps and hundreds upon hundreds of gallons of paint and turpentine and varnish, spare pump chains and bolts, sewing twine and iron bar stock, fishing lines and fire buckets, barrel hoops and soldering irons.39
The simultaneous arrival of Hull and Rodgers nearly drove the navy’s Boston agent, Amos Binney, to despair. He also had no money. By the third week in September the warehouse at the navy yard that could hold 1,200 barrels of salt provisions was empty. On October 7 Binney wrote Hamilton that he had actually advanced $52,501.96 on his own account, borrowing from banks and even personal friends to meet the navy payroll, procure medicines and provisions, and proceed with repairs of the battle damage sustained by the Constitution and the President: “I have exhausted every resource within my controul, and am paying interest on the most of this sum. I have been induced to make these extra exertions that the Squadrons should not be detained in port one moment on my acct at a crisis like the present.”40
The Constitution needed all new lower masts, many other new spars, patches to the outer layer of her hull, an entire new set of standing rigging. Bainbridge wrote Jones that he was even working Sundays to get the work done: “So you’ll perceive, that I dare even break the Sabbath in this Religious Land.” He was also so envious of Rodgers’s having the President that he offered him $5,000 to switch ships. Rodgers declined, and both Rodgers’s and Decatur’s squadrons got under way October 8, “whither bound, I know not,” Bainbridge said.41 It was actually Decatur’s ship that was now considered the poorest sailer of the three large frigates: the United States was known derisively as the “Old Wagon.”
The Constitution followed them out to sea three weeks later. Passing a fort in the harbor, the ship was hailed with three cheers from the soldiers. Before they sailed, Amos Evans noted in his journal that the congressional elections in Maryland had just gone strongly in favor of the Federalists. “What miserable dunces the people are to be so easily gulld!” Evans fumed. Widespread revulsion over the Baltimore riots had cost the Republicans their majority in the state, and among those newly elected to the House was Alexander Hanson, the editor whose newspaper, the Federal Republican, had been the chief target of the mob.42
· · ·
HIS BRITANNIC Majesty’s frigate Macedonian, Captain John Surman Carden, had been assigned to the Lisbon station since leaving Norfolk the previous winter, and among its tedious tasks was to carry home from the Peninsula the invalided Marquis of Londonderry, Charles William Stewart. Stewart had been serving as Wellington’s adjutant general in the campaign against Napoleon’s army in Spain, and when the nobleman arrived at Spithead, he expressed his “gratification of the Comforts & attentions he had receiv’d” on the voyage, Carden recalled, and asked the captain “what in the way of the Naval Service he could do for me.” Carden replied that the command of a frigate was all he could wish for, but ventured to suggest that the “only possible” addition to his ambition would be “a Cruise on the Western Ocean, where chances would be more favourable to my future prospects.” It was a wish, Carden later ruefully recalled, which only went to prove “how short sighted are the Creatures of this World.”43
In the ways of the Royal Navy and the influence of the well-connected, Carden received orders on September 29, 1812, to convoy an East Indies merchantman past Madeira, at which point he would be free to sweep the Western Ocean, hunting any French or American prizes he could find, for as long as his water and provisions held out.
The Macedonian had a reputation as a “crack ship”; she was also as unhappy a ship as there was. Carden was, to be sure, an experienced captain who appreciated the value of a well-trained crew, and he constantly exercised his men at the guns. He even encouraged incompetent men to desert with the winking assurance that he would not try to pursue them. The captain would eye a man with a meaningful look and order him to go ashore “to cut broom.” The
“broomers” would not return, and nothing more was ever said about them. But Carden was also an unflinching disciplinarian, regularly meting out sentences of three dozen lashes; punishing a man who was accused, probably falsely, of stealing a midshipman’s handkerchief with three hundred lashes; and teaching a lesson to the ship’s drummer who dared to demand a court-martial over a trivial offense by making sure he received a sentence of two hundred lashes through the fleet, a warning to any other men who had the insolence to question the captain’s authority to order punishment.
The real trouble was Carden’s first lieutenant, David Hope, a man who was not only a disciplinarian but a sadist, and especially enjoyed watching the ship’s boys being whipped. Since Hope joined the ship, punishments had become “an almost every-day scene,” said seaman Samuel Leech, who remembered the “gleam of savage animation” that would come over the lieutenant’s face when one of his victims was stripped and seized to the grating in preparation for a flogging.44
On Sunday morning, October 25, the Macedonian was about halfway between the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands, having parted company with the Indiaman three days earlier. For several days a shark, with its attendant pilot fish, had accompanied the ship: an ill omen that more than a few of her crew declared to be a presentiment that they would never see England again. The Sunday morning had brought a stiff breeze from the southeast. Just after breakfast the crew was mustered on the spar deck in their customary Sunday dress clothes—blue jackets, black glossy hats with black ribbons bearing the name of the ship painted on them—when the lookout on the masthead hailed the deck: “Sail ho!”
Since leaving Madeira, Carden had been more anxious than usual, on deck nearly all the time, constantly hectoring the man on the masthead to “keep a good look-out.” Carden came on deck in a flash, hailing, “Mast-head, there, where away?” The lookout reported that she was a large, square-rigged ship, on the lee beam. Then a few minutes later he added, “A large frigate, bearing down upon us, sir!” The crew was murmuring its own views of the stranger’s identity when Carden interrupted with “Keep silence, fore and aft!” and then “All hands clear the ship for action!”45
Eight impressed Americans were on the crew, and one of them, John Card, ventured to approach the captain and declare his objections to fighting against his own countrymen, should the ship prove to be an American. Carden was not the man to make the kind of magnanimous and chivalrous gesture Dacres had when he allowed the Americans on the Guerriere to go below. Erupting in fury, he ordered Card to his station and threatened to shoot him if he made the request again.46
At around 8:30 a.m. the approaching frigate was about three miles away when she suddenly wore around in the opposite direction, revealing the Stars and Stripes flying from her tops. Lieutenant Hope had just been urging Carden to steer directly for the enemy’s bows and risk taking a raking fire during the approach in order to close as quickly as possible; he brushed aside the captain’s concern about keeping the weather gauge, saying it did not matter whether they engaged from windward or leeward “as long as we went close alongside of the enemy.”47 Carden proposed keeping to windward and using that advantage to get past the enemy’s broadside at a safe distance and then wear around on to her stern, so he could then close the gap between the ships without being exposed to raking fire while also taking advantage of the apparently superior sailing speed of his ship. But the enemy’s maneuver seemed baffling on all counts. The British officers at first thought it must mean that she had thought better of seeking a fight and was fleeing. Carden ordered his ship brought closer to the wind to keep the windward position and the possibility of carrying out his original intention. The ships were now on a parallel course, sailing in the same direction, a lateral distance of about half a mile separating their tracks.
Then the enemy wore again, back on to her original course, though a bit farther off. As the two ships passed on opposite tacks, at about 9:00 a.m., the enemy’s entire lower gun deck erupted in a billow of flame and smoke. All the shot fell short, but Carden now knew he was up against one of the large American frigates, armed with a broadside of fifteen 24-pound long guns. A few minutes later he wore in pursuit.48
With the battle joined, Carden no doubt felt honor bound to close as rapidly as possible in the traditionally aggressive British fashion, but having let himself be baffled by the enemy’s initial maneuvers had placed him in the least favorable position to do so. A substantial lateral distance still separated them, and Carden was now facing a long, angling approach that exposed him to constant fire from the broadsides of an enemy whose guns substantially outranged his own eighteen-pounders. Overconfidently he pressed on; almost at once the American frigate’s fire began doing horrific execution. Samuel Leech had the job of powder boy, running filled cartridges from the magazine up to his gun, and all around him men were dropping. On one trip up from the magazine he suddenly saw blood flying from the severed arm of one of the men at his gun; he had seen nothing strike the man, just the instant effect of an incoming shot. A Portuguese boy stationed on the quarterdeck was carrying powder when it ignited, searing most of the flesh off his face. The boy “lifted up both hands, as if imploring relief, when a passing shot instantly cut him in two,” Leech said. Another man had his hand cut off by a shot, and then almost at the same moment a ball tore through his guts. Two seamen nearby caught him by the arms and, seeing the hopelessness of his situation, simply threw him overboard to a comparatively merciful death. Another man was carried past with the blood coursing out of him. “I distinctly heard the large blood-drops fall pat, pat, pat on the deck,” Leech recalled; “his wounds were mortal.” The goat kept by the officers to supply the wardroom with milk had her legs shot off and was thrown overboard. “The work of death went on in a manner which must have been satisfactory even to the King of Terrors himself,” Leech wrote.
At one point the American frigate made a sharp jog to starboard, then back on course, increasing his range, drawing out the British frigate’s ordeal. A little over an hour into the battle, when Carden finally succeeded in getting within half a musket shot, one hundred yards, it was over. All three of the Macedonian’s topmasts were gone, the main yard shot through and hanging in the slings that were rigged to hold up the spars during action. All the quarterdeck carronades on the starboard side were disabled, crippling the only weapons that offered a justification for closing to short range in the first place.49 The American ship backed her mizzen topsail to keep from shooting ahead and continued to pour on her broadsides, now bringing her spar deck carronades into play as well.
And then the American filled her mizzen topsail and majestically pulled ahead across the Macedonian’s bows, momentarily holding her at mercy; then, without firing a shot, the American frigate pulled off. Some of the Macedonian’s men broke out in cheers, thinking the American was abandoning the fight, but all the officers except for Lieutenant Hope knew better. Hope himself had been wounded, and when he was brought below to have his wound dressed, Leech said, “there was not a man in the ship but would have rejoiced” had he never risen up off the surgeon’s table. Hope was soon back on deck, urging the fight to continue. But at that moment the mizzenmast, “in a toppling state,” fell by the board. Once again a British frigate was described by her captain as “a perfect wreck, an unmanageable log.”50 An hour later the American ship came up again, having repaired her minor damage, and took up a raking position as the Macedonian hauled down her colors.
A boat came across from the American ship, and Carden was rowed back to deliver his surrender and found himself facing his old acquaintance from Norfolk, Stephen Decatur. “I am an undone man,” Carden said. “I am the first British naval officer that has struck his flag to an American.” Decatur smiled and, returning Carden’s proffered sword, replied, “You are mistaken, sir; your Guerriere has been taken by us, and the flag of a frigate was struck before yours.” And then he jokingly turned to his marine officer and said, “You call yourselves riflemen, and have al
lowed this very tall and erect officer, on an open quarterdeck to escape your aim?” But Carden thought Decatur might have spared the attempt at levity; of the fifty-two men and officers on his quarterdeck, he would later recall, forty-three had been killed or grievously wounded.
Decatur wrote his wife not long after, “One half of the satisfaction arising from this victory is destroyed in seeing the distress of poor Carden, who deserved success as much as we did, who had the good fortune to obtain it. I did all I can to console him.” Decatur paid Carden $800 to purchase his personal stores, including several casks of wine and the musical instruments of a band of French musicians whom Carden had recruited out of a prison hulk in Lisbon, and who now gladly agreed to join the United States.51
Decatur’s victory was as lopsided as Hull’s had been. A third of the Macedonian’s crew were casualties, 43 killed and 61 wounded. Among the dead were two Americans—including John Card, the man Carden had threatened to shoot if he did not fight. The United States had suffered a total of 7 killed and 5 wounded. Each ship had fired about 1,200 rounds; the Macedonian had taken 95 hits in her hull to 5 in the United States’.52 But Decatur’s aim all along had been to bring in his prize intact; a great deal of the American fire, especially at the start of the battle, had been aimed at the Macedonian’s spars, with devastating effect. Barrages of chain and linked iron bar and double-headed shot joined by rods sliced through the Macedonian’s sails and rigging while leaving her hull intact. Decatur unhesitatingly ascribed his victory to the accuracy of his own men’s gunnery, and singled out for praise the efforts of his first lieutenant, William Henry Allen, in training the gun crews.
Perilous Fight Page 22