Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  The funeral of James Lawrence in Salem on August 13, 1813, brought out the vice president of the United States and a host of other dignitaries to honor the slain captain of the Chesapeake. (Belcher, Account of Funeral Honours; courtesy U.S. Naval Academy Nimitz Library)

  British commander in chief John Borlase Warren, an experienced naval man and diplomat, was hampered by contradictory orders and a lack of support from London as he tried to enforce the blockade of America. (Painting by James Fittler, National Maritime Museum, U.K.)

  Warren’s replacement, Alexander F. I. Cochrane, had the aggressive instincts the British government was seeking—as well as a visceral hatred of Americans. (Painting by William Beechey, National Maritime Museum, U.K.)

  A day after assuming command, Cochrane gave notice of Britain’s intensifying economic warfare against America with a proclamation encouraging slaves to flee their owners. (The National Archives, U.K.)

  David Porter sketched this view of his ship Essex with her prizes in the harbour of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands: a respite in his remarkable cruise against British commerce in the Pacific in 1813. (Porter, Journal of Cruise; courtesy Charles E. Brodine Jr.)

  David Porter (Painting attributed to John Trumbull, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  More than six thousand captured American seaman were held in the notorious Dartmoor Prison, a veritable fortress surrounded by eighteen-foot-high solid granite walls and miles of uninhabited moorland in southwest England. (Library of Congress)

  SOME AMERICAN CAPTAINS OF NOTORIETY AND FAME

  William Henry Allen (Naval History & Heritage Command)

  Oliver Hazard Perry (Library of Congress)

  James Barron (Naval History & Heritage Command)

  Thomas Macdonough (Library of Congress)

  Macdonough’s crucial defensive victory on Lake Champlain in September 1814, effectively ended the threat of British invasion from the north. (Library of Congress)

  The Battle of New Orleans was one of the most lopsided engagements ever fought, affirming America’s ability to hold off the disproportionate might of the British empire. (Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER 9

  “My Country I Fear Has Forgot Me”

  Tattoos of early American seafarers (Dye, “Tattoos”)

  AMERICAN PRIVATEERS had been contributing no small part to the growing American strategy of trying to “make the war an evil” to the British classes that Madison believed most supported it; they had also been contributing mightily to the swelling population of American captives held in British prisons. And that was the trouble in a nutshell.

  From the start privateers had been enveloped in a mist of romanticism; the Republicans lauded them as “the militia of the sea” and “our cheapest & best Navy,” and with the way they seemed to roll republican virtue, American entrepreneurialism, and authorized swashbuckling into one, they offered a story no newspaper editor could improve upon. Privateers were nominally subject to naval discipline and the laws of war and acted with the authority of the president—that was what distinguished them from pirates—but other than that were not under the orders of United States authorities and were free to make war on the enemy’s commerce whenever and wherever they saw fit. One of the first acts of Congress upon the declaration of war was to authorize the president to issue commissions to private armed vessels empowering their captains to “subdue, seize and take any armed or unarmed British vessel, public or private,” and hundreds were issued in the first months of the war. (Although the term “privateer” was often used to refer to any private armed vessel, a distinction was usually drawn between privateers in the strict sense, whose only purpose was raiding enemy shipping, and letters of marque, whose major purpose was to carry a cargo, employing their arms to fight their way through or capture any prizes they fortuitously happened upon along the way.) Any shipowner who was prepared to swear that he was an American citizen and produce two “sureties” willing to sign a bond of $5,000 as a pledge that the ship would obey the laws of war was welcome to try his fortune. From Baltimore, Salem, New York, Boston, and other ports large and small, private armed vessels set out to sea, many bearing self-consciously patriotic names or christened after American military figures of renown, past and present. The small seafaring town of Marblehead, north of Boston, supplied 120 men to the American navy but six times that number to the privateers that sailed from the port; in Baltimore some 6,000 seamen made their way onto the 122 privateers and letters of marque that set out from that city in the course of the war. Some were the usual Fell’s Point rough customers, some were seamen from other ports up and down the Chesapeake, but a good many were farm boys with visions of glory and easy money or other romantics or naïfs drawn to the short stints and adventure the job offered. The rapacious recruiting agents who scoured the portside for men to make up the crews were never very particular.1

  American privateering vessels were often beautiful to look at, rakish and distinctive: sharp-lined schooners of two hundred or three hundred tons that could be built in a month and a half, almost everything about them designed for speed over safety or comfort; they had towering masts, light planking that offered little protection against enemy fire or even the normal hazards of wind and weather, almost always relying for their main firepower on a Long Tom, an eighteen- or twenty-four-pounder mounted on a pivot amidships, and almost always relying on cramming a crew of 100 or 150 uncomfortably aboard in order to board and man the prizes they hoped to take. To windward and with enough sea room they could escape from any large warship; with their fleetness and their ability to sail two points closer to the wind than a square-rigged vessel, they could haul off in a direction no frigate or ship of the line could follow. Nipping at the flanks of a convoy, they could dash in and grab a merchant vessel under cover of dark or work in pairs, one leading an escorting frigate off on a chase while the other went in for the kill.2

  A few of the privateers did spectacularly well marauding off Halifax and the West Indies, and even farther afield. The Yankee out of Bristol, Rhode Island, was the most successful of the war, taking a total of $5 million worth of enemy shipping in its five cruises, crisscrossing the Atlantic as far as Africa and earning its owners and crews $1 million from the sale of the cargoes and vessels it brought back to American ports. The True-Blooded Yankee, an eighteen-gun brig bought by an American in France, sailed out of Brest on March 1, 1813, and in thirty-seven days captured twenty-seven vessels, took 270 prisoners, held an island off the coast of Ireland for six days, briefly occupied a town in Scotland and burned seven vessels in the harbor, and returned to France with twelve thousand pounds of silk, eighteen bales of Turkey carpets, and two thousand swan skins, among her other booty.3

  By the end of 1812 American privateers had brought in some 300 prizes, and a year later the total stood at 700. The trouble was that it was coming at a terrible price. Like most gambling ventures, privateering generally did not pay off at all. Of the five hundred commissions issued to private armed vessels throughout the war, more than three hundred never took a prize before returning home or being captured themselves. Privateers took an average of only 2.5 prizes apiece, a third as many as the average American navy ship. And because they most definitely operated on the “pecuniary system,” they did exactly the things that vastly reduced a commerce raider’s effectiveness, as William Jones had pointed out in his orders to American naval commanders: weakening their crews by manning their prizes and risking their recapture by trying to get them into friendly ports rather than burning or sinking them on the spot. Of the 2,500 prizes taken during the war by American warships and privateers, about 400 were burned, most by the U.S. navy; of the remaining 2,100, some 750 were recaptured before they could be brought into American or neutral ports as prizes.

  Privateers also had little interest in taking prisoners so often simply released them. In August 1813 Congress authorized a bounty of $25 for each prisoner brought in by privateers and in March 1814 increased it to $100, but
still the fact was that American privateers were rapidly shifting the prisoner balance in Britain’s favor because any privateer that kept at it long enough was almost sure to wind up in enemy hands. Of forty-one privateers that sailed from Salem only fifteen remained uncaptured by the end of the war.4

  Still, the chance of hitting the jackpot kept owners and men, or at least a certain kind of men, coming. It cost about $40,000 to purchase and fit out a typical privateer schooner and a single lucky prize—like a West Indiaman laden with coffee, sugar, or rum—could clear $100,000, even after deducting a long list of fees and court costs that went to attorneys and prize agents and auctioneers and owners of the wharves and warehouses that stored the captured ships and cargoes while awaiting adjudication. The usual arrangement was that half the spoils went to the owners and the other half was divided among the officers and crew in proportion to their rank: one share for a landsman, two shares for an able-bodied seaman, up to sixteen for the captain.

  “Here was an opportunity of making a fortune,” remarked George Little, a merchant sailor who entered on board the small privateer schooner George Washington when he found himself stranded and moneyless in Norfolk soon after the start of the war. “But then it was counterbalanced by the possibility of getting my head knocked off, or a chance of being thrown into prison for two or three years.” On a typical good cruise an able seaman might stand to earn $300 in prize money for three months’ work, three or four times the going wage for an ordinary seaman on a merchant ship. On an exceptionally good cruise he could literally make thousands: a single prize that the Yankee took, the San Jose Indiano, sailing from Liverpool to Rio de Janeiro filled with silks and other valuable cargo, sold for half a million dollars when she was brought into Portland, Maine, bringing the captain $15,789.69 and even the ship’s two black cabin boys, the lowest men on the totem pole, $1,121.88 and $738.19.5

  On a bad cruise, the crew—like the owners—got nothing at all, except for a small advance against their shares paid when they signed on, supplemented sometimes by what they had managed to sell their prize tickets for before the cruise. In Baltimore and other privateering ports there was a lively trade in these tickets, issued to the crew and redeemable for their share of the proceeds when the prizes were finally sold. The tickets were bought and sold like commercial paper or stock shares, or more like lottery tickets, and a good many crewmen who signed on to privateers traded away their promise of future winnings for immediate expenses that the recruiting agents and other dockside merchants, and land sharks, were all too happy to provide: lodging, and clothes, and sea chests, and gewgaws, and food and drink, and small outlays of cash.6

  A few privateers were fitted out by experienced ex–naval officers, such as Joshua Barney, whose schooner Rossie, sailing from Baltimore in July 1812, was organized along tight man-of-war lines. But even though he took eighteen British ships in ninety days, Barney concluded the business was not worth it after that first cruise grossed only about $68,000 for the owners, and within a week of her return to Baltimore in October the Rossie was auctioned off. To try to improve the financial incentives, William Jones urged a reduction in the duties privateers had to pay on the goods they brought in; the federal duties sometimes absorbed nearly half the proceeds, while hurriedly arranged prize auctions cut into profits as well by driving down prices for vessels and cargoes such as sugar as much as 30 percent below the fair market value. In August 1813 Congress reduced duties on prizes by one-third.7

  But the real problem lay on the risk side of the equation. As the British blockade tightened and dangers grew, the business was left more and more to men of a very different stamp from professional navy men like Joshua Barney, or even professional seafarers of the kind who had plied the legitimate trading routes before the war. George Little, warily eying his shipmates aboard the George Washington, concluded that “they appeared to have been scraped together from the lowest dens of wretchedness and vice … loafers, highbinders, butcher boys &c &c” (a highbinder meaning a paid assassin), while the captain seemed “to be fit for little else than fighting and plunder.” Little was stunned when this “band of ruthless desperadoes” proceeded to plunder the personal belongings of the crew of the first prize they boarded, a merchant brig from Jamaica filled with sugar.8

  “I had heard much of the picked crews of American privateers,” said Benjamin Browne, similarly surveying the company he found himself among in Boston harbor on the deck of the privateer Grumbler (it was subsequently rechristened with the more seemly name Frolic). They had been recruited by laying out vast quantities of “villainous bad” whiskey, a few dollars’ advance money, “and the free use of that description of rhetoric which the Irish call blarney,” and “such a hatless, shoeless, shirtless, graceless, unwashed, but not unwhipped set of ragamuffins, I believe never before indulged the gregariousness of their natures by congregating together.” Josiah Cobb itemized the crew of the Boston privateer he joined in 1814, as a naive eighteen-year-old dreaming of adventures of the sea, as “Irish, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, African and American … and many who could hail from no quarter on the globe, but whose destination required no conjuring to ascertain.” Just before sailing, a man who had signed on as gunner’s mate came aboard Cobb’s ship and immediately began to storm and swear, saying he had sent his baggage aboard on a boat that morning and now it was nowhere to be found. Cobb innocently offered to help the man search, and they began shifting casks and boxes, inspecting hammocks, moving vast coils of rope, but after a while he began to notice the grins of the rest of the crew, who began offering facetious suggestions—“You haven’t yet searched the bottom under the ballast”; “Have you looked in the captain’s breeches pockets?”—and then one deadpanned, “Had you a suit in your bag with alternate stripes of blue and drab? Because if you had, you need not despair at your loss, for yonder you can get a match,” pointing toward the state prison in Charlestown, which lay in full view nearby. The man went slack-jawed and slunk away, because that was indeed where he had directly come from: he had just been released from seven years in prison and had no possessions at all, and had carried through the elaborate charade about his missing bags in an unsuccessful if imaginative bid to cover up the fact.9

  Privateers’ memoirs and logs brim with accounts of insubordination, fights among the crew, drunkenness, utterly incompetent seamanship, and men assigned stations they had no qualifications whatever to perform. Browne on joining the Frolic was promptly made captain’s clerk, purser, and sergeant of marines and told to drill the other green landsmen in the use of muskets, boarding pikes, and boarding hatchets. Recruiting surgeons to serve on privateers was so difficult that the George Washington’s specimen seemed to have been all too typical of the type who could be enticed aboard; Little described his ship’s doctor as a man “somewhat advanced in years” who had “read physic in a doctor’s office, and listened to some half-dozen lectures in a medical college,” and whose standard prescription for nearly every ailment was a pint of salt water.10

  Privateers were subject to the articles of war and naval courts-martial, but discipline was often almost a parody of a man-of-war’s. Even aboard the famously successful Yankee one of the lieutenants kept being found “dead drunk” and asleep throughout his watch. On another occasion the ship’s gunner, “much intoxicated,” blundered into the magazine holding a lit candle and nearly blew the entire ship to kingdom come. When the captain of the Harpy out of Baltimore tried to exercise his men in sail handling, having noted with concern how slow they had been in sending up the fore topgallant yard the day before, “all the crew came on deck in a mutinous spirit and absolutely refused to obey my commands,” the captain recorded. A few weeks later he tried to discipline a crewman for plundering the clothes of passengers from a Portuguese brig they boarded and had the man put in irons on the quarterdeck, where he sat “swearing he did not give a damn about the vessel or anything else,” and when the captain then ordered him gagged if he wouldn’t keep
quiet, “several of the crew cried out on the main deck they would be damned if I would gag him.” Every few days the captain’s log contained entries along the lines of “I reasoned the case with them … I found they would listen to no reason whatever.”11

  Enforcing discipline aboard hundreds of privateers was a burden William Jones had no interest in adding to the Navy Department’s already overwhelming responsibilities, and when the crew of the privateer General Armstrong returned to Wilmington, North Carolina, in April 1813 with the captain locked below, it was clearly more than the small U.S. navy gunboat detachment in the port or the department in Washington was able to cope with. The captain demanded that sixty-one of the crew be tried not only for mutiny but the even more serious charge of piracy, since they had taken two prizes after seizing control of the ship and therefore, the captain argued, were acting without a valid privateering commission. The prisoners were confined to three gunboats in Wilmington harbor, but the situation began to spiral out of control when a local man rowing by got into an argument with the navy sentries guarding the prisoners, and in the ensuing altercation was shot and killed. In June, Jones ordered the prisoners all released, arguing that the civil courts, not the navy, had jurisdiction over piracy cases and that in any case it was an impossible burden in wartime to detach five commissioned officers to Wilmington to convene a court-martial. The captain bombarded Jones with angry remonstrances; a local jury acquitted the navy officers of murder of the local man; and the General Armstrong’s crew never was tried on any charges, although an almost surreal prize case arising from their captures eventually reached the United States Circuit Court, with the captain appearing as a witness against his own ship’s owners while the chief witness in favor of the claimants was the leader of the ship’s mutinying crew.12