Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Lake Ontario, which was the gateway to the settled areas of Upper Canada, would become a frustrating exercise in strategic stalemate to both navies, “a warfare of Dockyards,” Jones would come to call it, as each side tried to outbuild the other; by the fall of 1814 the American navy would have 2,300 men on Lake Ontario, five times as many as were at sea at that point, and the British had by then launched from their harbor at Kingston a 104-gun vessel, among the largest warships in the world.67 Neither side would ever gain decisive control, and Yeo and Chauncey, both cautious in the extreme, avoided a decisive confrontation that might have settled the matter.

  Lake Erie was another matter, though. In September 1813 Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, a twenty-seven-year-old officer who had begged to be transferred from the tedium of commanding gunboats at Newport, Rhode Island, sailed from Presque Isle with his two new twenty-gun brigs and seven schooners and other small vessels, most of them converted merchant vessels mounted with one or two 24- or 32-pound carronades. At daylight on September 10, near Put-in-Bay at the western end of the lake, he spotted the British squadron and signaled his other vessels to close with the enemy. Perry’s flagship the Lawrence locked in a close-quarter carronade slugfest with the two largest British ships for two hours, fighting both sides of the ship simultaneously and taking 80 percent casualties until Perry was reduced to calling the surgeon’s assistants one by one away from their post helping the wounded in the wardroom below and then calling down, “Can any of the wounded pull a rope?” Then Perry rowed through a hail of fire to the as-yet-undamaged Niagara as the Lawrence, reduced to fourteen sound men, struck her colors, and the commodore brought the second ship into close action and carried on the battle for another forty-five minutes until the British commodore surrendered.68

  A month later Harrison’s army, swelled to 5,500 by 3,000 more volunteers newly arrived from Kentucky, assembled at the west end of Lake Erie, retook Detroit, and pursued the retreating British into Canada. At Moraviantown, fifty miles west of Detroit, the British army of 800 regulars and 500 Indians, including the famous chief Tecumseh, turned to make a stand along the Thames River. The Kentuckians persuaded Harrison to adopt the almost bizarrely unorthodox tactic of staging a mounted infantry assault, and the shock of 1,200 backwoodsmen armed with muskets galloping out of the woods broke the British line. Tecumseh was killed and most of the Indians fled. The Americans tore clothing, and hair, from the Indian chief’s body and then in a grislier spree of souvenir hunting skinned the corpse and carried off patches as trophies. Among the army’s other prizes was a cannon that had been captured by the Americans at Saratoga in 1777 and lost by General Hull at the fall of Detroit in 1812.69

  The naval contest on the lakes indirectly affected the broader naval war by cutting into the men, money, and materiel available to America’s oceangoing navy, but Secretary Jones saw it was fundamentally isolated from the real fight he had to wage against the Royal Navy. Secretary of State Monroe would derisively refer to the “fish-pond war” of the lakes, which touched the heart of the matter: it was a war in a teacup, unable to directly tilt the larger strategic balance. Even the victory at the Battle of Lake Erie, though it secured the American frontier territories in the west, was primarily a defensive victory that could not translate into the kind of leverage that would change the thinking of the councils in London. By the end of 1813, unable to sustain an offensive campaign on the Niagara frontier, the War Department withdrew most of its regulars and sent them east; they arrived just in time for Wilkinson to call off his inept campaign against Montreal and retreat into winter quarters south of the St. Lawrence River, where many of the ill-provisioned and ill-clad men suffered frostbite or even froze to death.

  “The difference between the Lake and the sea service,” Jones would observe, “is that in the former we are compelled to fight them at least man to man and gun to gun whilst on the Ocean five British frigates cannot counteract the depredations of one Sloop of War.”70 It was still to the oceans that Jones was looking to force Britain to come to terms.

  ONE OF THE most vivid and detailed accounts of the shocking devastation wreaked on human flesh by shot, splinters, and bullets in the course of naval combat came from the Battle of Lake Erie and the pen of Commodore Perry’s surgeon, Usher Parsons. Like most American naval surgeons of the era, Parsons was young—he was twenty-four at the start of the war—but well trained and fully qualified as a physician if still inexperienced. Although not an M.D., he had done an apprenticeship under the renowned Dr. John Warren of Boston and was licensed to practice in 1812 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. Unable to pay off his debts and unsuccessfully trying to start a practice in New Hampshire, he had applied to the navy as a surgeon’s mate as soon as war was declared and was practically overwhelmed with relief when he received his commission. “No one could imagine my joy, it was ecstatic, frantic,” he said. The two other naval surgeons of the young American navy who left written accounts of their experiences in the war had similar backgrounds: Amos Evans of the Constitution was twenty-seven at the war’s start and had studied in Philadelphia under Dr. Benjamin Rush, another celebrated physician of the period; James Inderwick of the brig Argus was twenty-three, had graduated from Columbia University, and was serving as the house surgeon at New York Hospital when he joined the navy in 1813.71

  The carnage Parsons faced during the Battle of Lake Erie was compounded by the hellish conditions he had to endure. In a larger ship the surgeon worked below the waterline, in the cockpit of the orlop deck; it was a tiny space, about sixteen by nineteen feet in the frigate Constitution, and the overhead space was so low, about four feet five inches, that the surgeon and his assistants had to work on their knees; but it was the stablest part of the ship and well protected from enemy fire. Not so in the small brig Lawrence. “The vessel being shallow built, afforded no cockpit or place of shelter for the wounded,” wrote Parsons; “they were therefore received on the wardroom floor, which was about on a level with the surface of the water.” Several cannonballs barely missed Parsons as he worked in the cramped space:

  Being only nine or ten feet square, this floor was soon covered, which made it necessary to pass the wounded out into another apartment, as fast as the bleeding could be stanched either by ligatures or tourniquet. Indeed this was all that was attempted for their benefit during the engagement, except that in some instances division was made of a small portion of flesh, by which a dangling limb, that annoyed the patient, was hanging to the body. Several, after receiving this treatment were again wounded, among whom was midshipman Lamb, who was moving from me with a tourniquet on the arm, when he received a cannon ball in the chest; and a seaman brought down with both arms fractured, was afterwards struck by a cannon ball in both lower extremities.72

  Parsons had already amputated six legs during the battle; he now faced ninety-six wounded, including thirty-six men brought aboard the Lawrence from the other ships of the squadron, and in the falling light Parsons decided not to attempt any more amputations until morning. He spent the evening tying off wounded arteries, administering opiates, and securing shattered limbs with tourniquets in preparation for the next day’s surgeries. “At daylight a subject was on the table for amputation of the thigh,” Parsons recounted, and he continued working nonstop, swiftly severing flesh and muscle with a sweeping motion of the large amputation knife, cutting through bone with saws, tying off severed arteries, moving on to the next patient. By midday all that grisly work was done, but it was not until midnight that he had finished tending to the fractures that could be set and the other lesser injuries.

  Although injuries such as chest wounds that today could be treated were deemed inoperable and hopeless, and although amputation was the simple and drastic remedy for many injuries that in later years could have been treated in ways that saved the limb, the surgical techniques applied were generally remarkably successful in saving the lives of even grievously wounded men, at least if their injuries were confined to an extremity. T
he basic surgical tools of the day—probes, scalpels, knives, scissors, forceps—were not much different from those of two hundred years later; even so horrific-looking a device as the trepan, designed to cut a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain from the life-threatening subcranial bleeding that often resulted from head injuries, was perfectly sound in principle and saved many a life. Only three of Parson’s ninety-six patients subsequently died, an outcome he attributed to fresh air, boiled drinking water, wholesome food, and “the happy state of mind which victory occasioned.” Parsons applied the $1,249 in prize money he received for the American victory to paying off his educational debts.73

  Where naval surgeons of the first years of the nineteenth century were far more helpless was in the treatment of garden-variety disease; the standard-issue medicine chest contained upwards of two hundred drugs, nearly all of them worthless and most of them poisonous. The standard treatment for all manner of ailments included bleeding, emetics, purgatives, and compounds containing mercury, lead, antimony, and other toxic substances. A common prescription for headache and fever was Dover’s Powders, a patent medicine combining the vomiting agent ipecac plus opium. For syphilis, which typically accounted for half the men out of action at any given time, the prescription was huge doses of mercury—the saying of the time was “seven minutes with Venus, six months with Mercury”—and the treatment was literally worse than the disease, causing first copious salivation, then ulcerations of the mouth, then loss of teeth and hair, and finally brain and kidney damage; only it was no treatment at all, having no effect whatsoever on the underlying disease itself.

  The only drugs of the naval surgeon’s armamentarium that actually had any beneficial value were opiates, which killed pain and stopped up the bowels of sufferers from life-threatening dysenterial illnesses, and Peruvian bark, which contained traces of antimalarial quinine. Forty percent of the Constitution’s recorded fatalities in the war were from disease. On the lakes the toll was far higher; “lake fever,” probably malaria, struck in late summer and dysentery in winter; illness that swept through Sackets Harbor late in 1813 killed an average of one man a day and left hundreds debilitated.74

  As in all wars, the greatest killer was one that took no human form at all, and was equally free of malice or chivalry.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Far Side of the World

  Woman of Nooaheevah (Porter, Journal of a Cruise; courtesy Charles E. Brodine Jr.)

  IN THE SUMMER of 1813 the first word reached America of the whereabouts of David Porter and the frigate Essex, not heard from since failing to make their rendezvous with Bainbridge off Brazil the previous fall. In August the Weekly Register printed a short notice of a report that had made its way to São Salvador stating the Essex had “certainly been in the South Sea,” apparently having rounded Cape Horn into the Pacific at some point during the winter. A month later the newspaper carried a report from Rio de Janeiro, dated June 27, that the British frigate Phoebe, carrying forty-six guns, accompanied by the sloops of war Cherub and Raccoon, was about to proceed south to Cape Horn in chase of the elusive American.1

  Porter’s orders from Bainbridge had instructed him that if from “some unforeseen cause or accident” he was unable to make any of his rendezvous by April 1, 1813, he could act according to his own “best judgment for the good of the service.”2 David Porter had always been more than a bit impetuous; it was a trait that had more than once nearly ended his naval career, and it had on two famous occasions singled him out as one of the two American naval captains that the British press could never mention without an obbligato passage of derision. (Rodgers was the other.) In 1806 Porter had nearly triggered an international incident by hauling a drunken British sailor aboard the Enterprize in Valletta harbor in Malta after the man had rowed by shouting insulting remarks to the Americans, and when the sailor refused to apologize, Porter ordered him to be given twelve lashes on the spot. A tense exchange of notes between the British governor of the island and Porter ensued, the British threatening to fire on him if he attempted to sail before the matter was resolved, Porter defiantly responding that he had no intention of being detained and would fire back at any attempt to stop him when he departed as he planned to that night. Then he coolly carried out his declared intention, sailing past the silent forts “without molestation.”3

  The other incident was not so creditable. Right after the declaration of war, Porter had administered an oath of allegiance to his crew of the Essex in New York harbor, and one of the men, a sailmaker named John Erving, refused on the grounds that he was an English subject. The crew, in a burst of rough enthusiasm, decided to tar and feather him and Porter gave his consent. Erving, turned ashore in New York stripped to the waist and covered with tar and feathers, was pursued by a mob until a shopkeeper took pity on him and sheltered him; the police then arrived and took him into custody for his own protection, cleaned him up, and gave him some new clothes. Secretary Hamilton sent Porter a stern rebuke but nonetheless issued Porter’s promotion to captain two days later. British writers never failed to bring up the incident; the Times referred to “Captain Porter (of tar and feathering memory),” and even years after the war he continued to be vilified in British accounts.4

  But Porter’s combativeness had none of the wounded or defensive self-justification that so ate at the spirit of his friend Bainbridge. Porter was as jealous for honor, rank, and money as any of his naval colleagues and carried on feuds with the best of them but seemed to find an outlet for his feelings in extroverted brashness rather than festering resentment. He thought dueling “a practice that disgraces human nature,” and he had the energetic and at times fierce intellect of a self-educated man, which had served him well in his fourteen years since joining the navy in 1798 as an eighteen-year-old midshipman. He came from a seafaring family and had sailed with his merchant captain father out of Baltimore from an early age; keenly aware of his educational shortcomings, he had applied himself tirelessly throughout his life to make up for it. As a prisoner in Tripoli he had studied French well enough to read, write, and speak the language competently, had worked at drawing and become a talented pen-and-ink artist, and had read history. He would later write the finest literary work of the war, his account of his cruise in the Essex, a book whose unguarded openness gave ample ammunition to his English detractors for years afterward but whose vitality came directly from not only its guilelessness but its restless intelligence. Where Bainbridge was reduced to stuttering in moments of emotional upheaval, Porter poured out prose and hatched ideas. His marriage in 1808 to the seventeen-year-old daughter of William Anderson—he was the Pennsylvania tavern keeper who a few years later had the misfortune to become famous as the Republican congressman caught pissing in the British ambassador’s fireplace—was marked by the same tempestuous energy; they had ten children, and many unhappy confrontations, over the years.5

  His ideas were as busy and extroverted as his actions, and if he lacked Decatur’s natural charisma or Hull’s natural empathy, he succeeded in keeping a happy ship simply by adding human nature to the list of things he applied his impatient curiosity to intently studying. “My chief care was now the health of the crew,” Porter noted a few weeks into his cruise on the Essex, and to that end he took a number of unconventional steps to improve the working conditions and routines of shipboard life. “Utmost cleanliness was required from every person on board,” and each man was given a half gallon of water daily and advised to bathe at least once a day. Porter enjoined his officers to keep the men constantly employed during work hours but allow them time every day for recreation and amusement “and to be particularly careful not to harass them by disturbing them unnecessarily during their watch below.” He allowed the men assigned to the main deck gun crews to sling their hammocks over their guns rather than in the overcrowded and airless berth deck below, insisting that it took no longer to clear for action and greatly improved health and comfort:

  What can be more dreadful than
for three hundred men to be confined with their hammocks, being only eighteen inches apart, on the birth-deck of a small frigate, a space seventy feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and five feet high, in a hot climate, where the only apertures by which they can receive air are two hatchways of about six feet square? The situation must be little superior to the retches who perished in the black hole of Calcutta.… From the number confined in so small a space, the whole atmosphere of the ship becomes tainted, and … every person on board, is affected by the pernicious vapours arising from the birth-deck.6

  At every port he could he took on oranges, lemons, plantains, onions, green vegetables, fresh meat, live pigs, fowl, sheep, turkeys, in what was practically a one-man crusade against scurvy. At the Cape Verde Islands he had cracked down on the huge trafficking in “bad rum” between the locals and the working parties sent ashore to fill the ship’s water casks—one favorite dodge of the beach vendors was to fill hollowed-out coconuts with liquor—but allowed the men to furnish themselves with pet monkeys and goats, “and when we sailed from thence,” Porter said, “the ship bore no slight resemblance … to Noah’s ark.” At the start of the cruise he had called the crew together and declared a general pardon for all offenses committed to date “and gave assurances that the first man I was under the necessity of punishing should receive three dozen lashes,” but expressing the hope that punishment “would be altogether unnecessary.” He was largely right: the crew returned the trust he placed in them and floggings were few and far between. He had a pet idea that fumigating the ship every day with vinegar poured over red-hot shot would have a salubrious effect, which probably had a talismanic influence at best; but his more practical notions about health had quickly reduced the sick list to 4 of the 319 men aboard. Even after a year at sea the Essex reported only four deaths from illness, one of them the ship’s alcoholic surgeon, who succumbed to “disease of the liver.”7