Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  That face-saving excuse was picked up with alacrity by the defeated British captains, who made a point of calculating the relative weight of metal thrown by the broadsides of their respective ships, stressing the relative sizes of their crews, and concluding that the Americans had a 50 percent or greater advantage. “On being taken onboard the Enemys Ship,” Carden wrote after his loss of the Macedonian, “I ceased to wonder at the results of the Battle; the United States is built on the scantline of a seventy four gun Ship … with a Complement of four Hundred and seventy eight pick’d Men.”

  It also quickly became an article of faith in British naval circles that a vast proportion of the crews of American men-of-war were British themselves, which helped to explain the American successes as well: the British navy was actually facing its own best men, trained by British captains, enticed into dishonorably taking up arms against their own country by the machinations of an unscrupulous foe. “I have no hesitation in believing that their crews are three-fourths composed of deserters from our own navy,” declared “An Englishman” in the Naval Chronicle. Defending himself at his court-martial, Dacres asserted, “I felt much shocked, when on board the Constitution, to find a large body of the ship’s company British seamen, and many of whom I recognized as having been foremost in the attempt to board.” By contrast, he declared, the Guerriere had been “considerably weakened” by his own chivalrous conduct in allowing the ten impressed Americans of his crew to sit out the fight.8

  AS THEODORE Roosevelt would later wryly observe in his history of the war, Dacres’s argument taken to its logical conclusion meant that the Guerriere was defeated because the Americans in her crew were not willing to fight against their own country while the Britons in the Constitution’s crew were. But the fact was that only a handful of British subjects were still serving on American ships of war once the war began.

  Almost all the assertions by British writers about the relative firepower of the two navies’ frigates were equally hyperbolic. All warships carried more guns than their nominal ratings, and while there was no doubt that the large American forty-fours were more heavily armed than the British thirty-eights they had defeated, the disparity was not that great. The American ships mounted a broadside of twenty-seven guns versus twenty-five on the British ships, and while the American guns were heavier in caliber, the Americans’ solid iron shot was less dense by about 7 percent due to defective casting; the result was that the total weight of metal in the broadside of the Constitution was only about 10 or 20 percent greater than the Guerriere’s or the Java’s. The United States mounted massive forty-two-pounder carronades on her spar deck, which theoretically increased the weight of her broadside to 40 percent over the Macedonian’s, but nearly all of that battle was fought out of carronade range, and the difference in weight of broadside from the two ships’ long guns was at best 30 percent.9

  Although the “disguised ship of the line” charge would become an enduring part of British lore of the war, in fact a British seventy-four threw a broadside with twice the weight of metal of even the large American frigates. Even some in England mocked that face-saving excuse at the time. William Cobbett, an English journalist who began his career as a fire-eating Tory, spent several years in the United States in the 1790s propagandizing for Britain, and in the early 1800s called for an unremitting stance against American maritime pretentions, had since done a complete about-face and become a thoroughgoing radical and supporter of America; just a few months after his release in June 1812 from a two-year sentence in Newgate Prison for treasonous libel, he published in his Cobbett’s Political Register some sarcastic doggerel in response to the shilly-shallying excuses being offered for the British naval setbacks:

  For when Carden the ship of the Yankee Decatur

  Attacked, without doubting to take her or beat her,

  A FRIGATE she seemed to his glass and his eyes:

  But when taken himself, how great his surprise

  To find her a SEVENTY-FOUR IN DISGUISE!

  If Jonathan thus has the art of disguising,

  That he captures our ships is by no means surprising:

  And it can’t be disgraceful to strike to an elf

  Who is more than a match for the devil himself—10

  Once the initial shock began to wear off, a number of more thoughtful correspondents to the Naval Chronicle began to assess the situation more objectively, suggesting in effect that it might be more productive to figure out how the British navy could start winning again rather than invest so much energy defending its losses as honorable ones. To be sure, defending British courage and honor was not merely a matter of national pride: much of Britain’s real deterrent power upon the seas rested on its captains’ undimmed reputation for courage. Yet it was clear to more than a few navy men that it was time to worry less about honor and more about practicalities. “It is not in our national character to despond, let us rather endeavour to trace the evil, that a remedy may be found,” wrote “A Half-Pay Officer,” who wondered whether the Americans had different equipment for their guns that enabled them to “have astonished us, not merely by taking our ships … but by taking them with such little comparative loss, and in so short a time.”11 Several noted the decisive advantage of the longer-range twenty-four-pounder guns employed by the American ships and recommended that British frigates needed to emulate this innovation.

  One of the few signed letters, from Captain William Henry Tremlett, asserted that while “much has been said about their superior weight of metal, and size of the vessels,” it was the Americans’ superior handling of their guns that was infinitely more important. The long neglect of gunnery in the Royal Navy was at last coming home to roost: “The first and grand cause is, that the American seamen have been more exercised in firing at a mark than ours—their government having given their commanders leave to exercise whenever they think proper, and to fire away as much ammunition as they please.” It would eventually come out that in their six weeks at sea, the crew of the Java had fired a total of only six broadsides before meeting the Constitution, all of them blanks. And Captain Tremlett noted that the damage done and the loss inflicted by American gunnery in all the battles was three to one, in one case ten to one, as great as what the British crews had been able to do, far beyond what any difference in the relative size and force of the ships could explain.12

  A number of writers to the Naval Chronicle even dared to offer blunt criticism of the most time-honored practices of the Royal Navy, suggesting that it had grown too large, too dependent on the dregs of society to man its ships, too addicted to brutal punishment of a kind long abandoned by the rest of civilized society. “The absurdity of our antiquated naval institutions and ‘customs,’ ” declared “Albion,” had produced a “dread of the service of their country among sailors.” That had made impressment a necessity to fill the navy’s ranks—which in turn both weakened the quality of the service and helped contribute to the very causes of the war that was now going so badly against Britain. “A Naval Patriot” agreed; the navy was manned by a very small number of real seamen and the rest the “good, bad, and indifferent, viz. ordinary seamen, landsmen, foreigners, the sweepings of Newgate, from the hulks, and almost all the prisons in the country.” With “such a motley crew,” he wrote, it was no wonder it was so hard to produce a well-disciplined and efficient fighting force.

  Another writer, denouncing the “system of coercion” that was equal to “the meanest capacities to execute,” called for an end to flogging and its replacement with a “system of attachment” that would inspire British seamen to work together for reward rather than punishment. “Want of feeling and sense generally associate,” he observed; “the wise and good” must take a stand against brutality, which had only weakened Britain’s claim to mastery of the seas.13

  · · ·

  IN PARLIAMENT, the wrath of criticism fell squarely on the government. Speakers berated the Admiralty for failing to issue proper orders to its admirals in North
America, failing to equip the navy with frigates equal to the Americans’, failing to send enough ships to the American coast, above all failing to emphasize sternness over forbearance in its prosecution of the war. “The arm which should have launched the thunderbolt was occupied in guiding the pen,” declared George Canning, America’s old nemesis. He took the government to task for sending out “not an Admiral, but an Ambassador; with instructions to carry, not fire and sword along the enemy’s coasts, but a flag of truce into his harbours; and instead of sinking, burning and destroying the American Navy, His Majesty’s ships were cooped up in the Halifax harbour, humbly awaiting the event of these overtures and negociations.”

  All agreed it was time for vigorous measures to teach the Americans a lesson for the “insolent spirit” they had shown. Britain had made magnanimous concessions only to have them spurned, had now suffered mortifications and insults intolerable to a nation that commanded Britain’s place in the world. Britain had not sought war, but now had no choice but to crush American recalcitrance and reassert British military ascendency, all the more so because of the danger that continued American resistance posed to Britain’s ability to concentrate its might on the more important struggle against France. “The paramount duty of British Ministers,” asserted the Times, “is to render the English arms as formidable in the new world as they have become in the old.”

  Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, struck a tone of aristocratic regret at the necessity of chastising Britain’s wayward offspring, but he left no doubt he meant to see the war through. While America might have legitimate grievances, he told Parliament, “she ought to have looked to this country as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization, but for her very existence.” Augustus Foster, who had been elected to the House of Commons upon returning from Washington, completed the picture of wounded British pride by observing during the debate on the war that Americans “generally speaking … were not a people we should be proud to acknowledge as our relations.” The debate concluded with an unopposed vote in favor of vigorous prosecution of the war, though not without a few opposition members cautiously suggesting that Britain would ultimately have to give way on impressment if the war was ever to end. But for now the government had the solid backing of British opinion for its policy of strong military action.14

  The attacks on the Admiralty’s management of the war, however, had hit home politically. In the first two weeks of January 1813 the London newspaper the Courier ran a series of daily letters “on the subject of the naval war with America” under the pen name “Nereus.” They were a thinly veiled counterattack from the government, trying to undo the political points that had been scored against the Admiralty. Their author coyly disavowed any inside knowledge of government policy, but with all the mastery of a practiced parliamentary debater, he mercilessly skewered the government’s critics and the jingoistic newspapers that had been so loudly denouncing the government for its supposed missteps and incompetence. Nereus mocked the very idea that Admiral Warren had been dispatched in the “character of a nautical negociator.” Admiral Duckworth in Newfoundland had been given positive orders to “attack, take, sink, burn, and destroy all American ships” as soon as war was declared. Far from having an “inadequate” force on the American station, the navy had positioned there at the outbreak of the war “a total of 85 sail, to oppose 14 American pendants.” Since then at least two more ships of the line and other additional ships had been dispatched. It was “mere accidents” that had caused the Constitution and the United States to fall in with lone British frigates rather than one of the five line-of-battle ships that were present on the station and which could easily have defeated them. And it would have been an absurd misallocation of resources for the British navy to have built and manned all of its hundreds of frigates with forty-four guns and five hundred men apiece just on the off chance that one of them might fall in singly with one of the large American ships, of which there were three to be found in the entire world. “Though the plodding pedantry of the Times should coalesce against me with the flippant ignorance of the Morning Chronicle,” Nereus asserted, he was confident the facts would show that there had been no negligence of any kind on the part of the government nor any hesitation on the part of its admirals to do their duty.15

  The Morning Chronicle for its part had a pretty good idea who it was dealing with. In an editorial replying to Nereus, the Morning Chronicle referred to him as “a poet,” “a lawyer,” “an Admiralty scribe”—and also as Harlequin, since he wears a “half-mask.” In fact, Nereus was none other than John Wilson Croker, secretary to the Admiralty Board. Croker (pronounced “Crocker”) was a young, ambitious, Irish-born lawyer, already a rising literary and political star when elected to Parliament at age twenty-six in 1807. The author of lyrical poems, anonymous satires about the Dublin stage and Irish society, and a serious and influential pamphlet on the state of Ireland, he was a mercilessly partisan debater and polemicist, famous for vituperative personal attacks on political opponents both on the floor of the House and on the pages of literary reviews. One victim of his literary criticisms called him “the wickedest of reviewers,” claiming he took morbid delight in inflicting pain on fellow authors.

  But Croker was also deservedly known as an indefatigable administrator. Shortly after being appointed secretary to the Admiralty in 1809 he had courageously exposed a senior naval accountant, a personal protégé of the king’s, who Croker discovered from a close examination of the files had embezzled more than £200,000. “I am almost always to be found at my desk,” Croker wrote an acquaintance. He told his wife not to bother writing “private” on any letters she sent him at the office, “as I open all letters myself.” Years later, looking back on the two decades he had continuously held the post at the Admiralty, he remarked, “I never quitted that office-room without a kind of uneasiness, like a truant boy.”16

  The secretary was nominally no more than a staff assistant and administrator to the Lords of the Admiralty, who determined policy and issued orders to captains at sea, but in practice when the secretary wrote “My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty command me to acquaint you” or “My Lords have thought fit to” or “Their Lordships are not prepared to,” it was John Wilson Croker and not their lordships at all who had often made the decision. So firmly had Croker taken control of the office in three short years, and so widely regarded—or at least mythologized—was his power among naval officers, that John Surman Carden was convinced to his dying day that the reason he never received another sea command after losing the Macedonian was not that he had lost a ship but that he had put his foot wrong with the secretary by incautiously referring to “their Lordships of the Admiralty’s” wishes in a way that suggested they, and not Croker, held the power to make decisions. “Woe to him who did not pay homage to this Tyrant,” wrote Carden.17

  Nereus may have been supremely confident of the conduct of the naval war with America and the complete correctness of the government’s handling of it to date, but Croker and the Admiralty privately were unmistakably alarmed by the unexpected turn the war had taken. At the very same moment Nereus’s letters were appearing in the Courier, the secretary was hurriedly ordering new strategies, weapons, tactics, and commanders into place. Among the steps were some of the very ideas Nereus heaped scorn upon in public. The Admiralty immediately commissioned a private yard to build five large forty-gun frigates as soon as possible to meet the threat posed by the more powerful American ships, and ordered the eighteen-pounder main guns of the Royal Navy’s one existing frigate of this class, the Endymion, replaced with twenty-four pounders during the extensive repair she was currently undergoing at Plymouth, expected to be completed in mid-1813. To reduce the weight and construction time of the new frigates, the Admiralty ordered them built of softwood rather than wait for increasingly scarce supplies of oak to become available—the jibes about America’s supposed “fir-built
frigates” notwithstanding. A design for an even larger fifty-gun frigate of about fifteen hundred tons was produced in three days, and orders for two were placed. And as a stopgap, three old seventy-four-gun line-of-battle ships—the Majestic, Goliath, and Saturn—that were about to be taken out of service and converted to prison hulks were ordered to be cut down instead as “razees” and sent to the American station: stripping off their top decks would quickly produce something that approximated the sailing qualities and firepower of the American forty-fours.18

  While Nereus was expressing indignation at the suggestion that Britain’s naval commanders on the scene had been lax, Croker was hectoring Warren with a series of increasingly impatient instructions, along with blasts of reproof for his lack of accomplishment and energy to date. The secretary was thirty-two now, just a little over half Warren’s age, and he had all of three years’ experience in naval affairs. But with the withering superiority that had become a deadly weapon in his hands, he proceeded to let Warren know exactly where he stood, instructing him on his defects in everything from his requests for additional force to the choice of words used in his dispatches, and warning him that the Admiralty now expected quick results.

  “My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty,” Croker wrote on January 9, 1813, “had hoped that the great force placed at your disposal … would have enabled you to obtain the most decided advantages over the Enemy, and to blockade their Ships of War in their Ports, or to intercept and capture them at Sea if they should escape the vigilance of your blockading Squadrons. In this expectation their lordships have been hitherto disappointed.”19 Warren’s unaccountable failure to keep their lordships apprised of Rodgers’s and Bainbridge’s movements, Croker told the admiral in a subsequent message, “has obliged them to employ six or seven sail of the line and as many frigates & sloops … in guarding against the possible attempts of the Enemy.” These deployments had required pulling ships from other vital duties to patrol the seas around Madeira, St. Helena, and the Azores. “My Lords cannot but hope that the reports which you state of swarms of American Privateers being at Sea, must be, in a great degree exaggerated,” the secretary continued, “as they cannot suppose that you have left the principal Ports of the American Coast to be so unguarded as to permit such multitudes of Privateers to escape in and out unmolested.” Their lordships were surprised to learn that the Spartan—this was the frigate Warren dispatched to Madeira to pick up a shipment of wine for the squadron—“was seen on the 28th Novr. in Latitude 39°.41.—North Longitude 25 West,” near the Azores, in spite of their understanding that she had been specifically instructed to sail in company with the Africa and in spite of the admonition from the Admiralty that frigates should not sail singly and be exposed to the superior force of the enemy. Their lordships desired that the logs of the Spartan be transmitted at once, as “they cannot suppose that with a knowledge that Commodore Ro[d]gers and Bainbridge with their respective Squadrons were likely to be at sea, you could have authorized the Captain of the Spartan to expose himself to the danger of meeting them, unnecessarily and out of your Station.”20