Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  “Choose your terms,” Broke wrote in a postscript, “but let us meet.”

  A small flotilla of boats followed the Chesapeake out of the harbor as she got under way from President’s Roads at noon. Just before sailing, Lawrence went below to his cabin to write a short note to Secretary Jones. “An English frigate is now in sight from my deck; I have sent a pilot boat out to reconnoiter, and should she be alone, I am in hopes to give a good account of her before night.” Huge crowds gathered every place in the town that commanded a view of the sea, but the two ships soon had dropped out of sight to the east, all their sails filled as they ran before a fair wind from the southwest.26

  At 4:30 p.m., on a line between Cape Cod and Cape Ann, the Shannon hove to and waited for the Chesapeake to come up.

  Broke was an exception to the Royal Navy’s neglectful attitude toward gunnery; he may have grown weary of the sea, but he drilled the men of his ship incessantly. He trained his gunners to carry out concentrated fire, the crews of adjacent guns all angling their weapons to converge on a single aimpoint. At his own expense he had fitted the Shannon’s guns with quadrants, to mark the aiming angles at various distances to targets, and dispart sights, which corrected for the elevation error that occurred when aiming along the top of the gun owing to the fact that the barrel is thicker at the breech than the muzzle. The sights were simple metal wedges affixed to the top of the barrel, but they made all the difference; they were fashioned so that their upper edge ran parallel to the bore, so aiming along that surface provided a true line to the target.

  Broke had also fitted his ship with two nine-pounders mounted on pivots on the quarterdeck and forecastle, raised so that they could shoot over the hammock nettings. As the Chesapeake closed the last distance between the ships, he ordered the men on the pivot guns to aim for the enemy’s wheel. Anticipating a brutal close action, Broke had already ordered small arms and grenades issued to the men in the tops and the members of each gun crew designated as boarders; chests of canister shot were hauled into the tops for the small swivel guns, and tubs filled with boarding axes, bundles of long pikes, and cutlasses and pistols stood at the ready on the gun decks.27 In the last few minutes of dead silence before the battle began Broke addressed the crew:

  They have said, and they have published in their papers, that the English have forgotten the way to fight. You will let them know today that there are Englishmen in the Shannon who still know how to fight. Don’t try to dismast her. Fire into her quarters; maindeck to maindeck; quarterdeck to quarterdeck. Kill the men and the ship is yours.… Don’t hit them about the head, for they have steel caps on, but give it them through the body. Don’t cheer. Go quietly to your quarters. I feel sure you will all do your duty, and remember that you now have the blood of your countrymen to avenge.28

  Whether out of an excess of reciprocal chivalry or an excess of concern to keep the weather gauge, which hardly would have mattered in the close action clearly in the offing, Lawrence declined to exploit the wide opening Broke had left him: Shannon lay with her head to the southeast, her main topsail braced so that it shivered to check the ship’s motion, and Lawrence could easily have crossed her stern and delivered a devastating raking broadside. But instead he came up “in a very handsome manner,” as Broke would later say, taking a parallel course fifty yards to windward, and at 5:45 p.m. the duel began.29

  As the Shannon’s guns bore, they began to fire in turn and simply tore the men on the Chesapeake’s spar deck to pieces. The first broadside sent grape and canister sweeping across the decks, decapitating the Chesapeake’s sailing master and killing the helmsman and the fourth lieutenant at once, striking probably 100 out of the 150 men on the top deck. A second helmsman immediately sprang to take the wheel and instantly joined the growing ranks of dead. Lawrence, conspicuous in his full-dress uniform—tall cocked hat and high-collared coat with epaulets and gold lace shining in the afternoon sun—was struck in the right leg by a musket ball and was leaning against the binnacle for support when a round shot from Shannon’s nine-pounder pivot gun found its mark and blew the wheel to splinters, killing the third helmsman and barely missing Lawrence.

  The Chesapeake had come on too fast initially, and now with the loss of her helm she forged ahead. The Shannon’s gunners had each fired three rounds in six minutes before their guns ceased to bear, and their fire had brought down the Chesapeake’s fore topsail yard and jib; now with her headsails gone she began turning helplessly into the wind, leaving her larboard quarter exposed to the Shannon’s mercy. Lawrence was struck by another musket ball, this time a mortal wound to the groin. Every man on the quarterdeck was mown down by grapeshot from the Shannon’s carronades and swivel guns in the tops. Lawrence was still conscious and called for his boarders, but the increasingly officerless ship was in a shambles. British grenades began pelting down and exploding on the deck. Lawrence was carried below, the first lieutenant was killed, the lieutenant of marines was killed, and then the Chesapeake, gathering sternway, crashed stern first amidships of the Shannon and Broke shouted for the boarders to follow him. George Budd, the Chesapeake’s second lieutenant, was at his station on the gun deck below, and several minutes passed before he received word that boarders had been called. The third lieutenant, William S. Cox, had left the deck to help carry Lawrence below, an act for which he would later be convicted by a court-martial eager to find scapegoats.

  Still, the Chesapeake’s men put up a desperate if disorderly resistance. The Shannon’s boatswain was attempting to lash the ships together by passing a rope over the American frigate’s taffrail when a crewman in the Chesapeake’s great cabin ran to the captain’s quarter gallery and, reaching up with his cutlass, hacked the man’s arm clean off.

  Broke, waving the heavy Scottish broadsword he favored in battle, clambered over the hammocks onto the roof of the Chesapeake’s quarter gallery, stepped onto the muzzle of a carronade and gained the quarterdeck, dodged a pistol shot from the Chesapeake’s chaplain and hacked off his arm in return, then shouted to his men to follow him forward. In the tops a steady fire was still coming from the Chesapeake’s marines and topmen, and Broke shouted across to his topmen to turn their guns against them; from the main- and foretops of the Shannon several men crawled out to the end of the yardarms to pick off the Americans, and from the foreyard five of the Shannons then leapt, incredibly, across to the end of the Chesapeake’s yard and took the foretop by storm.

  Broke arrived at the Chesapeake’s forecastle just as Lieutenant Budd appeared from below and tried to rally his remaining men; a furious musket blow from an American sailor left Broke momentarily stunned, and a second American then brought a cutlass down with full force, shearing off Broke’s scalp and cutting through the skull to bare his brains; a British sailor then ran Broke’s assailant through, and by that point the battle was essentially over, even if the blood-maddened fury continued for several minutes. The remaining Americans on the spar deck were herded down below, but some of the boarders fired down the hatches and others shot wounded Americans on the deck or threw them into the sea.

  The action had taken fifteen minutes and left horrific casualties on both sides. Nearly half the American crew were casualties, sixty-nine dead and seventy-five wounded, but so were a quarter of the British sailors. Several of the boarders had been mauled by grapeshot mistakenly directed at them from their own ship; others were hacked or pistoled. The Shannon’s surgeon itemized the grisly particulars:

  G. T. L. Watt, 1st Lieut grape carried away the top of his head

  Wm. Birbles, A.B. grape lodged in back part of chest. Lived several hours

  John Young, A.B. cut in two on board the Chesapeake

  J. Hampson, A.B. musket ball through the hip, cutting though the urethra

  James Wright, Ship Corpl. bayonet wound in the abdomen

  Thos. Barr, Ordinary head shot off30

  Five days later the Shannon led her prize into Halifax harbor, and the word quickly spread through the sleepy Sund
ay morning. At St. Paul’s Church, a whisper went from pew to pew during the service, and “one by one the congregation left” to run to the waterfront to witness the scene.31

  For a week Broke lay motionless, unable to speak in more than single syllables, shakily affixing his signature to a letter to Admiral Warren seeking to seize the moment to bestow some patronage upon his crew: promotions for his gunner and a carpenter who had served with him for seven years; an appointment as a cook for “my old coxswain Stark,” who lost an arm; a “comfortable retirement” for Marine Corporal Driscoll, who “I fear … will prove a cripple” and who has “a decent respectable wife & family.” Broke himself never fully recovered but was soon well enough to write his wife exulting over the release he had so honorably purchased, about the flower garden and greenhouse and new horse “we must have” with the £3,000 in prize money he would receive, assuring her that the celebrity and accolades would not turn his head: “I will be modest when I get to Suffolk and turn Farmer, renounce vanity with my laced coat.”32

  News of Broke’s victory arrived at the Admiralty in London on July 8, and Secretary Croker was able to announce it theatrically in the House of Commons during a debate on naval policy that same night, relishing a chance to skewer the government’s critics by pulling an account of British naval triumph out of his hat. Throughout England the exultation was hyperbolic bordering on manic. “Go, vain Columbia! boast no more,” declared one of the many celebratory poems that were rushed into print. The normally sober Naval Chronicle declared Broke’s triumph the “most brilliant act of heroism ever performed” in all of British history, hailed the rebuke to “American vanity” and the “unequivocal proof of their inferiority to us in fair and equal combat,” and gloated more than once over the report that a grand victory dinner was actually being prepared in Boston for the Chesapeake’s officers at the moment of her surrender, running a slightly puerile poem that ended with the lines: “But for meat they got balls / From our staunch wooden walls, / So the dinner Engagement was BROKE.” An action that in other circumstances would not merit more than recognition or promotion, much less so much as a knighthood, earned Broke a baronetcy. Both of his surviving lieutenants were promoted to commander, another highly unusual distinction.33

  Beneath the hoopla Croker was able to issue an order that would have been humiliating under other circumstances, but which confronted the new reality of this new war. Two days after announcing Broke’s victory in Parliament, Croker sent to all station commanders in chief a “secret & confidential” directive strictly forbidding any further single-ship combat with “the larger Class of American Ships; which though they may be called Frigates, are of a size, Complemant and weight of Metal much beyond that Class, and more resembling Line of Battles Ships.” In the event of one of His Majesty’s frigates falling in with such a ship, her captain was above all to “secure the retreat of His Majestys Ship.”34

  A subsequent American court-martial cashiered Lieutenant Cox for neglect of duty and un-officerlike conduct and sentenced the ship’s black bugler, William Brown, who had been found cowering under the longboat when he was supposed to summon the boarders, to three hundred lashes, subsequently remitted by President Madison to one hundred lashes.35 But William Jones used the opportunity to issue a directive to his captains to keep their eyes on the only strategy that mattered. His subsequent sailing orders to all of the American navy’s vessels would contain the injunction “You are also strictly prohibited from giving or receiving a Challenge to, or from, an Enemy’s Vessel.”

  As he would tell one of his captains: “The Character of the American Navy does not require those feats of Chivalry, and your own reputation is too well established, to need factitious support.”

  And he added: “His Commerce is our true Game, for there he is indeed vulnerable.”36

  ON THE same day the Chesapeake struck her flag, June 1, 1813, Stephen Decatur attempted to escape past the British blockaders that had been besetting the entrances to New York for most of the spring. For a week in early May he had waited in Sandy Hook Bay for a favorable wind that would carry the United States, the Macedonian, and the brig Argus past the British frigate and seventy-four that intermittently came into view to the south; a heavy sea would keep the seventy-four’s lower gun ports closed and cut her thousand-pound broadside in half, giving the impromptu American squadron a decisive advantage. But the winds remained light and baffling, and a welter of fragmentary and contradictory intelligence reports of additional British warships made Decatur increasingly wary. On May 15 he gave up the attempt to reach the open sea by that route and returned to New York.

  His new plan was to make the perilous passage through Hell Gate, the narrow channel from the East River that led to Long Island Sound. Decatur wrote Secretary Jones that he thought his chances that way were better on several counts; for one thing, the British ship of the line that was reportedly watching the end of the sound at Montauk, the Ramillies, was twenty-eight years old and “a much duller ship” than the Valiant off Sandy Hook. Moreover, there were reports that the frigate Orpheus that was in company with her had been making solo forays into the sound, so “it is not altogether improbable that I may fall in with her, out of the protection of the Ramillies.” On May 18, Decatur sailed up the East River, now with the sloop of war Hornet joining the two frigates. Argus stayed behind: she had just received new orders from Secretary Jones that “the President of the United States having in view a special service” for the ship, she was to remain in port, ready for “departure at a moment’s notice,” and await further instructions.37

  Hell Gate was a narrow, rock-strewn tidal channel notorious for its swirling currents and the hundreds of ships that had been wrecked trying to make the passage; some two thousand ships would be lost there before the Army Corps of Engineers in the late nineteenth century demolished the rocks with hundreds of thousands of pounds of dynamite. On the approach to the channel the United States ran aground and stuck, but was undamaged and floated on the next tide. All the ships made it safely through Hell Gate a few days later. But on the twenty-sixth a freakish lightning strike disconcerted everyone, splintering the United States’ royal mainmast and striking Decatur’s broad pennant fluttering down to the deck; then, surging down the mainmast, the charge leapt down the side of the ship and through one of the main deck gunports onto a cannon, down the wardroom hatch, miraculously skirted the scuttle to the magazine below, and tore through the surgeon’s stateroom, where it blew out a candle and destroyed the surgeon’s unoccupied cot, then finally exited the ship below the waterline, blowing out several sheets of coppering as it went. The Macedonian was following in close order, and her officer on deck instantly shouted for all her sails put aback, convinced the United States was about to be blown to bits by her magazine detonating.38

  Unbeknownst to Decatur, at that very moment both exits from New York were unguarded. Had he either turned back for Sandy Hook or pressed on toward Block Island, he would have made his escape free and clear at once. The senior British captain on the station was the Valiant’s commander, Robert Dudley Oliver, and seeing Decatur heading for Hell Gate, he had ordered the two small squadrons to switch posts. The Valiant was down to ten tons of water and her consort the Acasta had none, and they desperately needed to put into Block Island to replenish their stocks. But Oliver also clearly wanted a crack at Decatur himself, and when Sir Thomas Hardy, the Ramillies’ captain, arrived off Sandy Hook in obedience to Oliver’s orders and learned the real reason behind them he was livid. “It gives me a great deal of uneasiness to have quitted my Station just at this moment,” Hardy wrote Warren, “but I still hope that Commodore Decatur will change his mind and come out my way.”39

  Oliver raced along the southern length of Long Island to reach its tip before Decatur arrived there on his parallel course along its north side, through Long Island Sound. But Decatur, for reasons never subsequently explained, bided his time now as he made his way east along the sound. It was a week later,
on the morning of the first of June, that the United States, Macedonian, and Hornet passed between Block Island and Montauk Point at the end of Long Island, with the wind on their quarter and the two British ships in sight far to leeward. But unnerved by reports of other enemy vessels in the area, Decatur at that moment misidentified several other ships in the area as British men-of-war, and just as he was on the verge of making good his escape to the open Atlantic, he hauled his wind and beat back for the safety of New London. In the ensuing chase Acasta worked to windward and fired a ranging shot from her bow chasers, but still the American ships raced on, the Macedonian and the Hornet grounding in the mouth of the Thames River and the British ships abandoning their pursuit because they had no one aboard familiar with the tricky local channels.

  Decatur at once got the ships lightened and moved up the river and unshipped two carronades and several of the large guns from his ship to fortify the point at Groton commanding the approaches across from New London. The next day Oliver “pressed a fishing smack” to carry an express order to Hardy to return with his two ships, and on the seventh they arrived to tighten the blockade of New London. British raiding parties landed at the point and carried off cattle and boasted that they planned to attack the American ships as soon as reinforcements arrived. Fearing that the British would go to any lengths to recapture the Macedonian—“even if they followed her into a cornfield,” Decatur said—he ordered the ships lightened again and moved them eight miles up the river through shallow water and erected an earthwork fort that commanded the approaches by water and land. He had iron bolts driven into the rocks on either side of the river and a chain stretched across, and asked Secretary Jones to send some twenty-four-pounders from the navy yard in New York to reinforce the position. “At this point we shall be perfectly secure, as the channel is very narrow and intricate and not a sufficient depth of water to enable large ships to follow,” Decatur reported.40