Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Ill-disciplined crews and incompetent commanders on a number of occasions led to privateers’ blundering directly into enemy hands. The risk of being taken was greatest when running through the blockading squadron, where the shore limited maneuver room and a privateer was likely to find himself outnumbered and surrounded by a vastly superior enemy force, but even on the open ocean American privateers sometimes threw away their considerable sailing advantages through misjudgment and atrocious seamanship. After blundering within musket shot of a British frigate in the fog on December 14, 1812, the captain of the George Washington ignored the advice of all his officers and insisted on running before the wind, with the result that the frigate “overhauled us without any difficulty” and the crew were all taken prisoner, and remained in British captivity until the end of the war. The crew of Josiah Cobb’s privateer sailed within range of three British frigates before the sleepy lookout spotted them; the crew, then deciding that capture was unavoidable, proceeded to calmly and methodically loot their own ship, one man steadily applying himself to stuffing away most of a ham and a large wheel of cheese in the half hour before the schooner surrendered. “I goes always for the solids,” he explained. The next morning the crew were taken aboard their captor, and two of the Americans immediately began fighting with each other on the deck of the British man-of-war over some simmering difference, which prompted one of the British officers to offer aloud a facetious observation: “I will bear witness to their bravery, as I have seen them fight when surrounded by their enemies on all sides.”13

  Another American privateer captain, mistaking a British seventy-four for an Indiaman, ran his ship close alongside and hailed the British ship to strike her colors. “I am not in the habit of striking my colors,” the British captain called back, and at the same moment all three tiers of gunports flew open. “Well,” the American captain replied, “if you won’t, I will.”14

  FROM THE start, the British authorities in Canada and the West Indies were almost completely unprepared to deal with the flood of prisoners that came pouring in. As early as September 1812 there were already a thousand American prisoners being held on Melville Island in Halifax harbor; the island had a small garrison and fort consisting of a few wooden buildings, and the prisoners were crowded into the largest of them, a barnlike structure two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. Admiral Sawyer wrote Secretary Croker that he had had to purchase a captured American ship to serve as extra prison space, but even so the situation was miserable, and explosive.

  When the crew of the Vixen arrived on the prison hulk Loyalist in Port Royal harbor, Jamaica, in December 1812, it was already full of “a greater variety of living creatures” than Noah’s ark, in the words of one young American who had earlier been taken prisoner from a privateer. It held not only hundreds of captured Americans but a teeming population of rats and enormous and voracious cockroaches and bedbugs that dropped down on the sleeping men at night. “Had the ark contained as much filth as this old hulk,” the prisoner continued, “the dove never would have returned a second time with the testimony of her having found dry land.” When five of the Americans managed to escape in a boat after bribing one of the sentries with a bottle of rum, the guard was swiftly tried by a court-martial and sentenced to a thousand lashes; the last two hundred were put on after he was dead. “Far from my friends, my country, far from thee / A wretched captive sighs for liberty,” wrote the young American months later, despairing of his release.15

  Benjamin Waterhouse, a young surgeon on a Salem privateer captured at sea in May 1813, spent his first night in the prison on Melville recoiled in nightmarish distress and shock; many of the prisoners were crawling with lice, the hammocks were slung four high, one above another, between stanchions that ran through the open space like in a cattle barn, and the whole night was filled with the moans and complaints of his fellow prisoners, some sobbing at their fate, others cursing the British, one man reciting over and over what a fool he had been to have been so headstrong and disobey his parents’ wishes and go to sea. A little before dawn Waterhouse finally drifted to sleep only to be awakened almost instantly, it seemed, by the noisy grinding of locks being unbolted and the doors unbarred and the cries of “turn out—all out!” from the guards and the prodding of a bayonet when he groggily did not move fast enough. “But use makes everything easy,” Waterhouse philosophically observed.16

  Both sides were carrying on a war of nerves, the British jailers vexed and baffled by the defiance and petty retaliations the American prisoners were constantly practicing upon them. The British agent in charge of the prisoners at Halifax, a Royal Navy lieutenant named William Miller, was bombarded with complaints and demands and itemizations of rights he was violating. The jailers for their part kept up a steady stream of petty and not-so-petty harassment, forcing the prisoners to stand outside for hours on end, even in bitter cold and snowstorms, under the pretext that the barracks were being washed and that it would be injurious to their health to be allowed back in before all was “perfectly dry.” When the Americans sent a delegation to Miller to complain about the putrid beef being served, he erupted in a fury, ordered the prisoners assembled, mounted the staircase on the side of the prison building, and delivered them a harangue for their “impudence”:

  You are a mean set of rascals, you beg of an enemy favors which your own government won’t grant you! You complain of ill treatment, when you never fared better in your lives. Had you been in some French prison and fed on horse-beef, you would have some ground of complaint; but here in His Britannic Majesty’s royal prison, you have everything that is right and proper for persons taken fighting against his crown and dignity. There is a surgeon here for you, if you are sick, and physic to take if you are sick, and a hospital to go to into the bargain, and if you die there are boards enough for to make you coffins, and a hundred and fifty acres of land to bury you in; and if you are not satisfied with all this you may die and be damned.

  Then he strutted out of the prison yard to a chorus of hisses. The prisoners then took to hurling pieces of rancid beef over the picket fence surrounding the prison yard, which finally caused the quality of the provisions to improve.17 All the British officials who had American prisoners under their charge complained that they were ungovernable. Just days after the crew of the privateer Frolic arrived in Barbados, Benjamin Browne’s jailer told him that their forty men were more trouble than the five hundred French prisoners he had: “A Frenchman settles down at once in a prison, into habits of quiet order, industry, mild gaiety, and respectful submission,… but your men have such a wild, reckless, daring, enterprising character that it would puzzle the devil to keep them in good order.” When a marine sentry struck an American on a prison hulk in Hamilton harbor in Bermuda, the prisoners promptly sent a committee to the British captain “demanding satisfaction” and forcing from him an apology and an order that the guards were not to strike or abuse the prisoners. “This is all the satisfaction we recd,” wrote Benjamin Palmer in his diary, “but should another American be struck Farewell Marines—These d—m Englishmen must not think they have got Frenchmen to deal with.” A prison keeper in Halifax discovered another example of the Americans’ “enterprising character” when a Spanish silver dollar snapped in two in his hand: it turned out that most of the dollars in circulation in the canteen had been manufactured by one of the prisoners.18

  By the fall of 1813 there were rumors that all exchanges of prisoners had been halted. Still, Benjamin Waterhouse and his fellow prisoners in Halifax were constantly assured by their jailers that they would soon be on their way home, that cartel ships were arriving any day, and then one day Waterhouse was among a hundred Americans told to get their baggage, and soon he was being rowed out to a British warship in the harbor. Only when they were alongside the ship did they learn the truth: they were on their way not to home but to England. “Had Miller been on the boat with us,” wrote Waterhouse, “we should most certainly have thrown him overboard.”19


  The ship was the Regulus, a thirty-year-old frigate that had been converted to a troop ship twenty years earlier. The prisoners were locked down in the dark and airless hold, two carronades loaded with canister and grape were placed on the quarterdeck pointing forward to command the hatchways, and for the entire voyage the Americans were kept on scant rations as part of an apparently deliberate policy to keep them too weak to try to take the ship. All they could think of was food, Waterhouse recalled; hunger followed them into their sleep, when they would dream of lavish meals and heavily laden tables; they had lengthy debates over whether it was better to eat the worms in the half pound of bread they received each day and whether it was more pleasurable to eat it all at once or in small portions throughout the day. The soldiers who had come to Canada in the ship had left behind an army of fleas that added to the torment of their passage.

  One of the American prisoners, passing the Regulus’s captain with his mess’s allotment of oatmeal gruel from the galley, finally burst forth with a complaint: “Sir, Sir, but it is fit food only for hogs.” The captain indignantly asked him what part of America he came from to be so particular about his tastes. “Near to Bunker Hill, Sir,” the prisoner shot back, “if you ever heard of that place.”

  On arriving in the Medway they were transferred to a prison hulk, the Crown Prince, one of fourteen old demasted ships of the line moored in the river. Some of the ships held as many as nine hundred prisoners at a time. “Casting a glance around,” wrote an American of his arrival belowdecks on the Irresistible, “I found myself amidst a squalid, cadaverous throng of about six hundred, ranging from fourteen to sixty years of age; and never beheld a set of more wretched human beings. They were nearly starved and almost naked, and wholly unable to take exercise.… It was too dark to read, so they yielded up their minds to corroding despondency, and became sullen and morose. Their features become rigid, and to see a smile upon a face was like a sunbeam illumining a thunder-cloud.”20

  Still, the food was a significant improvement; the Americans on the Crown Prince drew up a constitution, a code of laws, and a court to discipline themselves; the smaller number of French prisoners already aboard, however, devoted most of their time, and all their effort, to running billiard tables and roulette wheels, that they had somehow managed to fashion, and with which they proceeded to methodically part the new arrivals from all their cash. “These Frenchmen seldom failed to win,” Waterhouse noted, and were charmingly merciless in refusing to extend credit to the victims they had cleaned out: “I am sorry, very sorry indeed; it is le fortune de guerre. If you have lost your money you must win it back again; that is the fashion in my country—we no lend, that is not the fashion.” A few of the Americans sought their revenge by proposing a wager on whether one of them could tie up a Frenchman and toss him in a sack, but the Frenchmen again demurred: “No, it is not the fashion in our country to tie gentlemen up in sacks.” The Americans finally announced there would be a vote on whether to abolish gambling. The motion passed, with the French opposing.21

  Escape might have seemed hopeless, but sixteen men got away one dark night by cutting a hole through the stern and bending the copper down, slipping into the water, and swimming ashore. The copper was then pulled back up into place, and before the next head count the following evening the prisoners also cut a small hole through the deck; after the sergeant had counted the men on one deck, sixteen men slipped through to the next deck and were counted again. But a second escape attempt gave the game away when one of the prisoners’ nerves failed him and he was spotted trying to swim back. The officers searched the ship to try to discover how anyone could have gotten out and finally found the sally port, eliciting a huge roar of laughter from the Americans as they stood gaping at it.

  A brasher attempt took place in broad daylight on the adjacent Irresistible. Four Americans, one of them an Indian of the Narragansett tribe, “a man of large stature and remarkable strength,” grabbed the sentry guarding the ship’s jolly boat, which was alongside with all her oars in; threw the sentry into the boat; jumped in after him; and rowed like madmen for the shore, to the uproarious cheers and shouts of encouragement of the prisoners watching from all the hulks in the river. Soon about thirty boats, with 350 British seamen and marines, were in pursuit, firing at the fleeing prisoners. On reaching shore, the fugitives abandoned their hostage and ran flat out for the fields, well ahead of the pursuing marines. But they were quickly surrounded by the local country people, who poured out of the farmhouses and brickyards and recaptured them all but the Indian, who Waterhouse, watching from the deck of the Crown Prince, could see “skipping over the ground like a buck.” But then he too went down, spraining his ankle while leaping a fence.22

  The attempt clearly had the British rattled, and the Americans gleefully intensified their sarcastic barrages. Some of the prisoners had taken to studying mathematics to fill the time, and now whenever one of their British jailers walked by, one of the American students would look quizzically at his slate and say aloud, as if reciting an arithmetic problem, “If it took 350 British seamen and marines to catch four Yankees, how many British sailors and marines would it take to catch ten thousand of us?” A story got around that the commander of the Crown Prince, a superannuated forty-five-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant named Osmore—who seemed to look upon his duties mainly for the embezzlement opportunities they presented—had poached some sheep from a field nearby for his personal use. A few days later, as Osmore was getting into the boat with his wife and family to head ashore, a raucous chorus of “Baa! Baa! Baa!” suddenly broke forth from all the ship’s ports. Osmore retaliated by barring the boats that called daily to sell the prisoners garden vegetables; the prisoners then appealed to the commodore for a hearing, which gave them a chance to put Osmore completely on the spot by gravely begging him to explain, both to themselves and to his commanding officer, “how such an unmeaning sound could be construed as an insult.” The ban on the market boats was lifted.23

  A few months later all the prisoners were ordered to be put aboard tenders for transfer to Dartmoor Prison. This was the final hardening of the British stand on American prisoners: in January 1814 officials in Washington learned that the British had completely “discontinued the system of releases on account” of American prisoners. In May, Cockburn reiterated his instructions that no captains were to agree to on-the-spot exchanges; all captured Americans were to be sent directly to prisons. “My Ideas of managing Jonathan,” he wrote to Admiral Cochrane explaining his decision, “is by never giving way to him, in spite of his bullying and abuse.”

  Instructions went to Halifax from London ordering the wholesale transfer to England of prisoners held there; a large number of ships were due to arrive in the spring transporting fresh troops to Canada, and on their return they were to be filled with the prisoners. At around the same time a decision was made to concentrate all American prisoners in England into one tightly secured location. Dartmoor was a virtual fortress, located in one of the most desolate spots of England, surrounded by miles of wild and uninhabited moorland near the southwestern coast, and usually shrouded in a bone-chilling damp and fog. It had been built in 1806 specifically as a depot for prisoners of war, and with the coming of peace with France in April 1814, it was going to have plenty of room for the six thousand American sailors the British now held in depots and prison hulks scattered around a dozen and a half locations in England, Canada, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and beyond.24

  The night before one of the last remaining drafts of prisoners was taken off the Crown Prince, there had been another spirited display of American “impudence”; an altercation with Osmore had resulted in thirty men having their hammocks taken away as punishment, and the men decided that if they would not be able to sleep, Osmore would not either. They waited quietly until ten o’clock; then all hell broke loose in a cacophony of Indian war whoops, oaken benches battering against bulkheads, tin and copper pans banging together. Osmore became so enraged at o
ne point that he threatened to order the marines to fire down the hatches on them. Finally the men quieted down, waited another half hour, then repeated the performance. And so it went all night.

  The next morning, as the tender carried them off, a cry of “Baa! Baa! Baa!” came across the water, continuing without cease until the ship was out of hearing.25

  BY THE END of 1813 the only American traders who could obtain insurance for their cargoes were letters of marque, and not just any letters of marque but only those swift, sharply built schooners of the kind that the shipwrights of Baltimore and New England had long earned a reputation for. They could carry only a fraction of their maximum load without risking their best sailing trim; insurance rates were a seemingly catastrophic 50 percent, if coverage was obtainable at all, which meant that as far as the underwriters were concerned it was no better than even money that they would successfully run through the two gauntlets of British blockaders, on the American and French coasts; but there were great profits to be made where good luck and good seamanship held. Cotton that sold for thirteen cents a pound in Charleston went for twice that in France. And although it was not their first object, there was always the chance of happening upon a convoy-dodging British merchantman that could be taken as a prize along the way.

  It was a strange way to carry on trade or fight a war, but as Yankee sea captain George Coggeshall noted, by this point in the war “there were but three ways for captains of merchant ships to find employment in their ordinary vocations: namely, enter the United States Navy as sailing masters, go privateering, or command a letter-of-marque—carry a cargo and, as it were, force trade and fight their way or run, as the case might be”; and of the three, the last was the least bad on several scores. The captains and crews of letters of marque were a noticeable cut above most of the out-and-out privateers. For one thing, they paid an actual wage to their crews—thirty, forty, even fifty dollars a month—and so drew the more experienced able-bodied seamen, leaving the more desperate characters to the privateers. Like Coggeshall, their commanding officers were usually experienced merchant captains who knew how to handle a ship first and foremost, had sailed often to France and farther points before the war, and had backgrounds much like many of the American navy’s officers, even if they lacked the fighting experience. Coggeshall was twenty-nine, had been at sea since he was a boy, and was the son of a sea captain.26