But this was the moment Essex’s crew had been waiting for. As David Farragut would later recall, “I have never been on a ship where the crew of the old Essex was represented, but that I found them to be the best swordsmen on board. They had been so thoroughly trained as boarders, that every man was prepared for such an emergency, with his cutlass as sharp as a razor, a dirk made by the ship’s armorer from a file, and a pistol.”21 Porter ordered fifty-five men into seven boats, giving them “the most positive orders” to stay together and bring all the boats into action as a single force, and they pulled straight for the larger of the two ships. The boats were a mile away from their quarry when the ships hoisted English colors and fired their guns “to terrify them,” as Porter would describe it, but still they pulled on, and when they were right under the muzzle of the guns of the Georgiana, Lieutenant Downes in the bow of the lead boat ran the American colors out on a pike and asked if they surrendered. The response was three cheers and a shout from many of the men on deck, “We are all Americans!” In fact, a good many of the British whalers were manned by Nantucket whalemen, and while some Nantucketers strongly sympathized with the British in the war, this crew clearly did not. The boats quickly took possession of the Policy, which lay a quarter mile away, and then in the afternoon breeze that sprung up, the sails of the two prizes filled and they majestically bore down for the Essex, greeted by her wildly cheering crew.22
“Fortune has at length smiled on us,” Porter declared to the men of the Essex. “Continue to be zealous, enterprising, and patient, and we will yet render the name of the Essex as terrible to the enemy as that of any other vessel, before we return to the United States.”23
EVEN MORE valuable than the two whalers were the stocks of water the Essex now took from them, and because whalers always counted on being at sea for well over a year, they were veritable floating warehouses of spare naval stores of all description: cordage, canvas, tar, paint, spars. The crew of the whalers had, to the great regret of the Essex’s men, thrown overboard fifty Galápagos tortoises in clearing for action, but a few days later they found them floating in the sea all about the ship, in the same place they had been dropped, and pulled them up. Porter refitted the Georgiana as a cruiser to serve as the Essex’s consort; the men worked for days knocking out her heavy brickwork and iron boilers used for trying out the blubber, and put all sixteen guns aboard her. Five of her crew, all Americans, agreed to sign on as volunteers, and Porter willingly received them.
Back at Charles Island, Porter’s growing squadron loaded two thousand gallons of water, a backbreaking exertion, each man making four trips a day lugging a ten-gallon keg from a spring three miles inland; the water smelled and tasted foul and was full of slime and insects, but “to us it was a treasure too precious to lose,” Porter said. They tried digging two wells, but after getting down “a considerable depth” salt water flowed in. Sailors who frequented the Galápagos had learned that the huge tortoises could survive for a year or more without food or water, and four to five hundred were brought aboard and formed an extraordinary sight, piled on the quarterdeck under an awning to give them a chance to “discharge the contents of their stomachs” before being stowed away live below, “as you would stow any other provisions, and used as occasion required,” Porter said.24
Over the next seven weeks the Essex and the Georgiana took six more letter-of-marque whalers, and by that point Porter had put so many of his officers aboard them as prize captains—he had even pressed the ship’s chaplain and marine lieutenant into this duty—that the only officer left to take charge of an American whaler they had recaptured, the Barclay, was twelve-year-old midshipman David Farragut. The Barclay’s master was an old and violent-tempered American mariner named Gideon Randall whose entire crew, except for the first mate, had jumped at the opportunity to abandon him and had entered as volunteers on the Essex the moment they were recaptured. A draft of men from the American frigate was sent back to work the ship with Farragut in their charge, and the arrangement was that Randall would continue to be in charge of navigating the vessel. But when, on July 9, Porter ordered four of the prizes plus the Barclay to be taken into Valparaíso for sale, Randall furiously came on deck muttering that he would shoot any man who dared to touch a rope without his orders. “I’ll go on my own damn course,” he said, and disappeared below for his pistols.
Farragut recalled, “I considered that my day of trial had arrived … But the time had come for me at least to play the man.” Mustering his courage, he politely told the first mate that he desired to have the main topsail filled. The man responded at once “with a clear ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ in a manner which was not to be misunderstood,” said Farragut, “and my confidence was perfectly restored.” Farragut sent word to the master that he was not to appear on deck with his pistols “unless he wished to go overboard; for I would really have had very little trouble in having such an order obeyed.”25
Leading the convoy to Valparaíso was Lieutenant Downes in the Atlantic, the largest of the prizes yet; she was carrying one hundred tons of fresh water and eight hundred large tortoises when they took her on May 29, a godsend of a windfall; she was also faster than any of the others, so Porter decided to replace the Georgiana with the Atlantic as his consort, fitted her out with twenty guns and sixty men, and renamed her the Essex Junior. Over the next twelve weeks, while Downes sailed to Valparaíso and back, Porter took four more fat prizes, all British letter-of-marque whalers like the others. He had again shifted the appearance of the Essex, repainting her and adding to the possibilities of bafflement and ruses by repainting one of his prizes to look exactly like the Essex and one of the others to look like a sloop of war. One of the prizes in this final haul was the Seringapatam, which was a more than slightly fantastic vessel with an odd story on several counts. Originally built as a man-of-war for Tippoo Sahib, the maharaja of Mysore, she was constructed of beautiful teak and was reputed to be a very fast sailing ship. Although she had come to the Pacific on a whaling expedition, her master had spent all his time since arriving taking American whalers as prizes. But when Porter asked him for his privateer’s commission, the man, “with the utmost terror in his countenance,” informed him that it had not arrived yet but was no doubt waiting for him in Lima. Porter ordered him thrown in irons and said he intended to send him to America to be tried as a pirate. Porter put twenty guns on the Seringapatam and took her into service as another of his auxiliaries and a possible replacement for the Essex if a calamity befell her.26
Besides his piratical prisoner, Porter had been accumulating during their sojourn in the Galápagos a lot of other baggage he desperately wanted to be rid of, including $100,000 worth of whale oil and an increasingly unstable lieutenant, James Wilson. With extraordinary coolness Porter had faced Wilson down at one point when, inebriated and violently insolent, the lieutenant had grabbed for his pistol after Porter told him he was under arrest. Wilson subsequently insisted he meant only to kill himself, but either way he was hardly someone a captain of a man-of-war wanted to rely upon. Porter solved all three problems by putting the oil, the prisoner, and Wilson aboard the Georgiana with orders for America and hopes they would be able to run the British blockade of the American coast by timing their arrival to midwinter.
At the end of September 1813, Downes returned in the Essex Junior with the news that there was no market for the captured ships in Valparaíso, and he had had them laid up. He also brought a letter for Porter from the American consul in Buenos Aires. It reported that on July 5 the British squadron had sailed from that port in pursuit of him.27
The Essex had now been at sea a year. The rats had multiplied to the point that they were eating not just provisions but clothes, flags, sails, and gun cartridges, even endangering the planking of the hull with their gnawing. When the crew finally reached a sheltered port where they could completely empty the ship and smoke it with charcoal to fumigate the interior, they counted 1,500 dead rats in the basketfuls carried up and thrown ov
erboard when the operation was complete.28 But the copper sheathing was coming loose too, and the bottom was fouled with barnacles and sea grass, and the rigging was in need of complete replacement; and so on October 2, a few days after Downes’s return, the Essex, the Essex Junior, and the three other remaining prizes set sail for the Marquesas Islands, a remote well-watered spot 3,500 miles to the west that had been frequented by American whalers from time to time since Captain Cook visited there in 1774.
“We are bound to the Western islands with two objects in view,” Porter informed the crew in a written notice. “First, that we may put the ship in suitable condition to enable us to take advantage of the most favourable season for our return home: Secondly, I am desirous that you should have some relaxation and amusement after being so long at sea, as from your late good conduct you deserve it.”
For the remainder of their passage, Porter said, the men “could talk and think of nothing but the beauties of the islands,” and he was not talking about the scenery. “Every one imagined them Venuses, and amply indulged themselves in fancied bliss.”29
IT HAD BEEN a long and trying summer of 1813 for William Jones.
In May his burdens had been doubled, more than doubled, when he was named acting secretary of the Treasury in addition to navy secretary. Secretary Gallatin was gone to Europe on what would prove a fool’s errand, an attempt to open peace negotiations with the British under a Russian offer of mediation; the American peace commissioners sat in St. Petersburg for six months, until the very end of 1813, before finally learning that Britain had rejected the czar’s offer. But before leaving Washington, Gallatin had written up a long memorandum of instruction to Jones that basically gave him all the responsibilities and no authority to initiate any actions on his own.
No one wanted to be in Washington in the summer, but especially not that summer of 1813. In June President Madison was struck ill with dysentery and for five weeks lay bedridden at his home, Montpelier, at times not expected to live; then for months afterward he recuperated slowly, trying to manage affairs of government by correspondence as he put off his return to Washington as long as he might. Secretary of State Monroe was in Virginia; Secretary of War John Armstrong was in upstate New York trying and failing to reconcile his warring generals Wilkinson and Hampton; and so William Jones was effectively left to run the whole government in Washington and push a desperately needed and desperately unpopular tax bill through Congress.
Even leading Republican newspapers were now at last acknowledging that there was no choice but to impose a new internal tax to pay for the war. The Treasury had just barely managed to raise a $16 million loan to cover the 1813 budget, but it had been touch and go; only by offering a discount of 12 percent was the loan finally subscribed, and two-thirds of the entire amount was taken by three wealthy merchants, John Jacob Astor among them. The punishing discount rate was a further reminder that there was little future market for United States government paper without some assurance that there would be at least some government revenues to eventually pay back investors.30
But financial reality was one thing, politics another. The Twelfth Congress had refused to even consider a tax measure all through the winter, then just before adjourning in March 1813 it had dumped the problem on its successor, passing a resolution summoning the new Thirteenth Congress to meet six months early, at a special session in late May, to take up the matter.
And so week after week the prematurely summoned congressmen met in their stifling chambers, getting nowhere. “Every one is for taxing every body,” said John W. Eppes, Jefferson’s son-in-law and the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, “except himself and his Constituents.” At the beginning of the special session it was “hotter, in this house, than purgatory,” remarked one congressman, and by July it was more like hell: “the doors were closed and we were boiled and roasted three hours longer; almost to suffocation.”
Finally, in July, the Republicans passed a $5.5 million tax bill, $3 million of that in the form of a direct tax on land, dwelling houses, and slaves. Still, putting off the evil day as long as possible, they voted it would not go into effect until January 1814 and would last only one year. The rest of the money was to come from excise taxes on stills, sugar, carriages, bank notes, auction sales, retailers’ licenses, and other odds and ends.
Administering the new taxes was an enormous new duty that fell squarely in the lap of the acting Treasury secretary. Writing “to my beloved Wife and friend” in mid-July, Jones complained of the “multiplicity of details and arrangements to be made,” not least the hiring of nearly two hundred revenue agents, one for each congressional district; even months later not only were more than a third of the positions vacant but no applications or recommendations had been received for filling them.31 And almost as soon as the tax bill had passed, Jones had to go back to Congress with a new request for an emergency loan of $7.5 million to cover an unexpected shortfall in the current year and bridge the gap of the following year’s expenditures until the tax revenues started to come in. The loan was approved, and eventually subscribed at an 11.75 percent discount, a small vote of confidence from the market compared with the mood in the spring.
Meanwhile, the normal vexations of public duty continued without relent. Jones told Eleanor that at his office he was “like a public pump kept constantly wagging by every one who thirsts after honors or emoluments which they run off with whilst I am left dry.” With the passage of the tax and loan bills he hoped to beg off his double duty; but, he wrote, “A day or two since I expressed to the President my earnest wish to be relieved from the immense responsibility of the Treasury Department added to the laborious and highly responsible duties of the Navy, but he received it with so much repugnance … that I shall find great difficulty in renewing the attempt … No! There is no hope of Comfort or domestic peace, until Heaven shall turn the hearts or humble the pride and malice of our Enemy.”32
Eleanor had come to Washington in May for a short stay before the worst of the Washington summer hit; her sister back in Philadelphia had written her shortly after her arrival, already missing her company, but adding, “Altho you have left your relatives and friends here, what sweet consolation you have in the society of your best and invaluable friend, in him you can find consolation in any situation in life.” She returned to Philadelphia in July, leaving Jones again “a hermit & slave” in his lodgings, as he put it; but when she came again to Washington in September they at last would be able to move into their house. He figured it would save them $120 a year in rent and also allow them to save half what he was spending for the board of their three servants.
Add to all this we shall both be infinitely happier. For myself—my wife my few friends and my home are the greatest solace that kind Heaven can bestow with the moderate means of enjoying those blessings. My spirit, naturally good and disposition cheerful (for Heaven and you well know that had they not my heart must have long since bowed down) has really had but little to preserve their natural tone.… The little recreation I get is a ride to the Navy Yard where I mount my hobby horse and feast my eyes upon the noble ships that are building and their little children the beautiful barges which I have constructed after my own fancy. These little excursions have in a great degree sustained my spirits and my health which is excellent.33
He indulged himself with a few visions of their domestic comforts to come, sending Eleanor a list of delicacies he hoped she could purchase in Philadelphia, or on her way through Baltimore: a hogshead of Snowden & Fishers pale ale (“particularly if they have any such as they put up for India”); a barrel of good last year’s cider; a keg of nice pickled tripe; mustard, two bottles of cayenne pepper, spices, herbs; raisins, almonds, currants, filberts; twenty pounds of macaroni and a dozen pounds of vermicelli; a few pounds of good chocolate (“as we shall have a cow”). He hoped they could be moved in by October 1 so that they would have at least a month to be fully settled before they needed to plunge into their social
duty of entertaining members of Congress returning to town for the regular session.
Before Eleanor could arrive, the “lashing” that he had told her she must be prepared for as his price of taking public office arrived first. “Before this reaches you in all probability as calumny travels fast,” he wrote her in early September, “you will have seen your husband denounced as a ‘Villain and base Coward’ in the Georgetown Federal Republican. Though I know this may wreck your heart for the moment your own experience independent of your love will pronounce it a base calumny. Let it not give you any moments thought.”34
The incident bordered on the absurd but was nonetheless potentially deadly. To organize the harbor defenses of Baltimore, Jones had named Joshua Barney, a veteran of the Continental navy and a successful privateer captain, to take command and organize a flotilla of shallow-draft rowed barges that Barney himself had developed. After reading an announcement of Barney’s appointment in the newspaper, an old Baltimore enemy of Barney’s, Lemuel Taylor, sent Jones a letter denouncing Barney as “a most abandoned rascal, both as to politics and morals,” and asserting that “he is despised by nine-tenths of all that have taken an active defence of Baltimore.” After Jones showed the letter to Barney, to give him “the opportunity of vindicating his reputation,” Taylor challenged the secretary to a duel, claiming he had committed a “flagrant breach of trust” in thus making the letter public. “As every man of honor and common sense in my position would have done,” Jones replied, “I declined the invitation,” sarcastically adding that since “every Editor in Baltimore” had shown the decency and good sense not to publish Taylor’s subsequent public letter declaring Jones a coward, Taylor had had to deliver it “through the common sewer,” meaning the anti-administration Federal Republican. But meanwhile Barney himself challenged Taylor to a duel and shot him in the chest, seriously wounding him, ending the episode. “It is very difficult for a public man to defend himself against calumny,” Jones wrote Eleanor.35
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