Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  It was also difficult to defend himself against the constant irritations of job seekers and others with claims to advance. James Barron—living in Denmark since his ignominious surrender of his ship in the Chesapeake–Leopard debacle, supporting himself with royalties from a few inventions, and working as master of a brig plying between Lisbon, Gothenburg, and Copenhagen—wrote Secretary Jones a strange and paranoid letter in July 1813 asking to be reinstated now that his five-year suspension was up. “I never can, nor never will, acknowledge that the sentence under which I have laboured was just, or that it was not the result of malice,” he insisted. He said the officers who testified against him at the court-martial were guilty of perjury yet had got off scot-free. If the secretary would look into the mater fairly, “the strength of your mind and the justice & liberality of your disposition” would discover a matter “treated with as much Injustice & Inhumanity as any that ever came under your inspection.” He did not wish to impose too much on the secretary’s time, but “my only wish in life is to have an opportunity to prove to the world in general and my Country in particular that I have suffered without Just cause for there are circumstances known to those intimately acquainted with the particulars of that affair, that would in my humble opinion convince the world, that I was, to say the least of it, cruelly sacrificed.”36

  Secretary Jones declined to respond.

  AFTER SLIPPING out of New York on June 8, 1813, and shaking off the British blockading squadrons in a fog bank off the coast, the United States brig Argus proceeded on “the special service” that the president had ordered her to stand at the ready to perform: she was to deliver the new American minister to France, William H. Crawford, to the first port they could make on the French coast, “without deviating for any other object.” In command was Henry Allen, just promoted to master commandant for his part in the Macedonian victory, and he cracked on with all sail the small ship would carry, keeping his distance from the strange sails they passed, logging eight or nine knots, an escort of porpoises following alongside. For the first few days a variable and contrary wind kept the ship almost constantly tacking and running across the swell, and Minister Crawford observed in his diary that he “cascaded copiously.”

  But their wind and luck held; even a raging mid-Atlantic storm that forced them to scud on bare poles blew them in the right direction, propelling the Argus 525 miles in three days, and in four weeks they arrived at L’Orient, dropping anchor on July 11. A week later, ready for sea again, Allen called his officers together and read them the rest of Secretary Jones’s orders now that the minister had been safely delivered:

  It is exceedingly desirable that the enemy should be made to feel the effect of our hostility, and of his barbarous system of warfare; and in no way can we so effectually accomplish that object, as by annoying, and destroying his commerce, fisheries, and coasting trade. The latter is of the utmost importance, and is much more exposed to the attack of such a vessel as the Argus, than is generally understood. This would carry the war home to their direct feelings and interests, and produce an astonishing sensation. For this purpose the cruizing ground, from the entrance of the British Channel, to Cape Clear, down the coast of Ireland, across to, and along the N.W. Coast of England, would employ a month or six weeks to great advantage.

  Jones emphasized to Allen that destruction was his object; he was to burn the prizes he took except in the most exceptional circumstances. “There are very few cases that would justify the manning of a prize; because the chances of reaching a safe port are infinitely against the attempt, and the weakening of the crew of the Argus, might expose you to an unequal contest with the enemy.”37

  This was the first solid test of Jones’s strategy of striking at Britain’s commerce with small, fast, solitary-cruising vessels, and Allen proceeded to carry out his instructions with gusto. For four weeks, on the very doorstep of the enemy, the Argus left a trail of burning hulks. At the mouth of the English Channel, Allen took three homebound British merchantmen, then repainted his ship to resemble a British man-of-war with a broad yellow stripe along the gunports and shifted his ground to the west and stood off the coast of Ireland. Slipping unnoticed in the night within musket shot past a British frigate escorting a ninety-ship convoy sailing home from the Leeward Islands, he dropped to the back of the convoy and began picking off stragglers. By the time a British warship finally caught up with the Argus in the early morning hours of August 14, she had taken twenty prizes, twelve of them in just the last three days.

  Already exhausted from the rampage, Allen’s crew had worked through most of the night removing a valuable cargo, wine and fine Irish linens, from the last prize they had taken and had not been in their hammocks more than ten minutes when they were called to quarters at 4:00 a.m.; the Argus could easily have outrun the British brig Pelican that now was approaching in the predawn gloaming, but this was where Secretary Jones’s pragmatic strategy and his officers’ still-unsatisfied search for honor parted company. Allen had told his crew that the Argus could “whip any English sloop-of-war in ten minutes,” and he gave the order to shorten sail and let the enemy come up. In the short, murderous action that followed, Allen was struck by a thirty-two-pound shot above the left knee just minutes into the battle as the ship’s rigging was cut to pieces. The Pelican was a larger and slightly more heavily armed ship, but there was no comparison in the accuracy of her fire, which was deadly. A quarter of the Argus’s crew was killed or injured. Lieutenant William Watson had his scalp taken off down to the skull by a grazing grapeshot and was knocked unconscious; Midshipman William Edwards’s head was torn off by a round shot; a thirty-two-pound ball carried away both of Midshipman Richard Delphey’s legs; and forty-five minutes after the battle began, as British boarders swarmed over the sides of the American ship, most of the Argus’s demoralized crew ran below while the one surviving lieutenant hauled down the colors. Surgeon Inderwick amputated Allen’s leg at the thigh, and for a while it seemed he might survive, but gangrene set in and four days later he died ashore in a prison hospital at Plymouth.38

  John Rodgers in the frigate President led the Royal Navy on a much longer wild goose chase through the summer of 1813, like Allen sailing defiantly straight through British home waters, taking and burning prizes as he went; he reached Bergen, Norway, on June 27, outrunning two British warships in an eighty-hour chase off the North Cape, returning to intercept trade passing in and out of the Irish Channel, finally running right through the British blockading squadrons and into Newport harbor on September 26, snapping up Admiral Warren’s tender, the schooner High Flyer, on the way in; the American boarders took possession so quickly, immediately placing a guard over the captain’s cabin, that the crew did not have time to destroy the squadron’s signal book.

  Rodgers returned with a logbook filled with sarcastic and cantankerous observations about the enemy. On May 28 he had chased, boarded, and released an American ship bound from New York to Lisbon and from her obtained a newspaper with an account of the British sack of his hometown of Havre de Grace. No other reason was offered for this attack by “the Mild, the Philanthropic, the Eloquent, the Seasoned, & the Brave Right Honourable Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, Knight Baronite &c. &c. &c.,” Rodgers said, than “because it gave Birth to a Captain of the American Navy.” Halting an American ship returning from Cádiz to Boston, the Acteon (John H. Rogers, master), Rodgers adopted the familiar ruse of flying British colors and passing for the British frigate Acasta, “which gave me an opportunity, I am sorry to say, of discovering that my name sake, John Rogers, is not overburthened with patriotism.” In all he had taken twelve prizes, a meager and disappointing showing, he felt, for five months at sea; he was also disappointed that he had been unable “to add any additional luster to the character of our little Navy” with any glorious victories against the Royal Navy.39

  But Jones was full of praise and wrote back at once:

  The effects of your Cruize however is not the less felt by the enemy
either in his Commercial or Military Marine, for while you have harassed and enhanced the dangers of the one, you provoked the pursuit & abstracted the attention of the other to an extent perhaps equal to the disproportion of our relative forces, and which will not cease until his astonishment shall be excited by the Account of your arrival.40

  In fact, it was a perfect demonstration—notwithstanding Mahan’s later theories about concentration of force to the contrary—of how a single marauding commerce raider at loose on the vastness of the ocean could tie up a huge portion of the enemy’s navy just hunting for him. At one point, Warren had 25 ships, including 6 seventy-fours and 10 frigates, patrolling the Atlantic from the banks of Newfoundland, Cape Sable, and Georges Bank to the entrance of the Chesapeake in an attempt to block Rodgers’s return to port. Warren once again found himself writing to Croker like a penitent schoolboy: “It is with extreme regret I am under the necessity of communicating for their Lordships information that Commodore Rodgers has effected his arrival in the United States Frigate President at Newport, I had made the best disposition in my power to intercept his return into Port and I am sure that every Captain was anxiously vigilant to fall in with him.”

  Warren’s fleet had now grown to 129 ships, including 15 seventy-fours and 28 frigates, but still it was not enough. Even as he was preparing to obey an Admiralty order to extend the declared blockade to the northern approaches to Long Island Sound and all “Harbours, Bays, Rivers, Creeks, and Sea Coasts” south, a hurricane hit Halifax on November 12, 1813, driving 50 to 60 ships in the harbor aground, including 30 warships that required major repairs, some of which were still incomplete the following March. The seventy-fours, including Warren’s flagship San Domingo, were especially hard hit.41

  Warren’s blockaders had sent in 225 prizes to Halifax during the year 1813 and privateers sent in another 112; at least 300 more prizes taken by Royal Navy ships were sent into Bermuda, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands, for a total of more than 600 American merchantmen captured during the second year of the war. American exports had fallen to $28 million in 1813, down from $61 million in 1811. But American warships and privateers had still been able to get to sea, taking 435 prizes themselves during 1813. And as if to end the year with a final thumbing of their nose at the blockade, the Congress sailed back into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on December 14 and the Constitution put out to sea from Boston on the last day of the year; neither encountered any British opposition.42

  On December 30, 1813, Warren wearily sent another request to Croker for reinforcements in a letter that had more than a bit of the air of a defeated commander, dwelling completely on his fears and problems rather than his plans for bringing the war to the enemy. “The rapidity with which the Americans, build and fit out their Ships, is scarcely credible,” he wrote in exasperation. At New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore “every exertion” was being made to prepare vessels of war, including “a very large Class of Corvette Ships,” some of which were already launched and many others nearly ready. Two ships of the line, one at Portsmouth and one at Boston, were to be finished and launched in March. The southern coast around Charleston had become a refuge for privateers. Several large clipper schooners managed to escape from the Chesapeake, “nor can any thing stop these Vessels escaping to Sea in dark Nights and Strong Winds.”

  Warren concluded his plea, “I take the liberty likewise to represent that as all American Men of War, Privateers and even Traders, are particularly good Sailing Vessels, such of his Majesty’s Ships as are appropriated to my Command, should be of the same description.”

  Even Henry Hotham, the man the Admiralty had sent out to help put some order and steel into Warren’s command, was ready to give up by the end of the year. Inasmuch as “your Lordship’s intentions and my expectations have been disappointed,” he wrote Melville in a private letter, he begged to be relieved of his duty as soon as arrangements for that purpose could be made.43

  WITH THE end of 1813 came the final gasp of chivalry in the naval war between Britain and America. Master Commandant William Henry Allen was given a funeral with full military honors at Plymouth; his coffin was attended by eight Royal Navy post captains as pallbearers and preceded by an honor guard of two companies of Royal Marines. All of the British navy’s captains in port followed the procession.44

  An even more poignant display of mutual respect took place a month later in Portland, Maine. The morning of September 8 every business in town was shuttered as two barges, each bearing a coffin, slowly rowed to shore and a minute gun sounded alternately from the two warships standing in the harbor, one the captured British brig Boxer, the other the American brig Enterprize. Three days earlier, just north of Portland, the two ships had maneuvered to within half a pistol shot, a mere ten yards from each other, before opening fire. The outfought British ship surrendered half an hour later; again a British court-martial would admit that the enemy’s “greater degree of skill in the direction of her fire” was responsible for the outcome. But both captains were mortally wounded in the first broadside, Samuel Blyth of the Boxer cut in two by an eighteen-pound shot, William Burrows of the Enterprize blasted with canister shot in the thigh, and their deaths had cast a solemn pall over the news of the American victory when the ships reached Portland the next day.

  From the Union Wharf, a military escort led the procession of the two captains’ coffins, Isaac Hull and other American officers following with the entire surviving crews of the two ships, British prisoners and American victors alike. At the Second Parish Meeting House the coffins lay side by side, and then the two rival captains were buried next to each other. It was, wrote C. S. Forester, “a civilized gesture in a war that threatened to become uncivilized.”45 Beyond the mutual accusations of barbarity and atrocity was a settling sense on both sides that only a war of grimly determined destruction could now bring the other to terms. By the end of 1813 the Admiralty had decided to replace Admiral Warren with a man made of sterner stuff.46 He was Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane, who had commanded successful amphibious landings in Egypt and Martinique and who possessed a deep personal loathing of Americans, in part because his brother had been killed at Yorktown in 1781.

  The loss of the Argus had meanwhile left Madison and Jones more determined than ever to stamp out any remaining inclinations on the part of American captains to place honor above the dispassionate calculus of destruction; there was no other way to bring the war home to the enemy. The president wrote Jones lamenting Allen’s death and the loss of the Argus but adding:

  It proves also the great capacity of that species of vessel to make the war an evil to G.B. and particularly to the class of her subjects who promoted it. Would it be amiss to instruct such cruisers positively, never to fight when they can avoid it, and employ themselves entirely in destroying the commerce of the Enemy.47

  Jones’s sailing instructions became even more emphatic in stressing commerce destruction and forbidding challenges: there were to be no more affairs of honor on the high seas, even when the odds were equal. “The Character of the American Navy stands upon a basis not to be shaken, and needs no sacrifices by unequal combat to sustain its reputation,” he wrote in what by the end of 1813 had become a typical instruction to his captains. “You will therefore avoid all unnecessary contact with the Cruisers of the Enemy, even with an equal, unless under circumstances that may ensure your triumph without defeating the main object of your Cruise.”

  That object was destruction, pure and simple; American warships were to burn every British ship they took; the old game of spoils, of taking prizes and sending them into port, was incompatible with the cold strategic dictates of this increasingly modern war. “A Single Cruiser, destroying every captured Vessel, has the capacity of continuing in full vigour her destructive power, so long as her provisions and stores can be replenished,” Jones stated in another order to a captain about to depart on a cruise. “Thus has a Single Cruiser, upon the destructive plan, the power perhaps, of twenty actin
g upon pecuniary views alone; and thus may the employment of our small force, in some degree compensate for the great inequality compared with that of the Enemy.”

  There was another “great object” too, Jones began emphasizing to his commanders. It was one likewise dictated by the end of the chivalrous rules with which the war had begun. American captains were now instructed to seize as many British prisoners as they could—not release or parole them, not send them home in sea cartels, which the British government in any case refused to recognize—and bring them back to America “in order to exchange against our unfortunate Countrymen who may fall into his hands.”48 It was all about evening the body count. The anonymity of numbers was beginning to speak louder than the exploits of heroes.