Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  On the night of November 14, 1813, a thick nor’easter moved into Newport, and obscured behind sheets of blowing snow and propelled by the fresh gale, the schooner David Porter passed rapidly by the fort, out of the harbor, and soon was beyond the blockading squadron, on her way first to Charleston with a load of butter, cheese, and potatoes, then across the ocean for France with a richer cargo. Coggeshall, as captain, had put up $1,500 of his own money in the venture, a quarter of the purchase price of the schooner. The David Porter had the typical armament of a letter-of-marque schooner, four 6-pounders that were not much more than for show but also an 18-pounder Long Tom, that versatile weapon of intimidation, mounted amidships; she also had a far better than average crew, hired at $30 a month for an able seaman, Coggeshall having managed to find most of his thirty men and petty officers, including the gunner, boatswain, and carpenter, right out of the frigate President, which had just returned to Newport with many of her crew past the end of their two-year enlistments.

  Nearing Charleston, Coggeshall was chased for four hours by a British brig; the wind was off the land and the brig had the weather gauge. Hoping to draw the brig off so he could tack and weather her, Coggeshall steered wide to leeward. But the brig kept her course to cut off any such attempt at getting to windward, and now Coggeshall feared he was being driven into a trap and decided to run for it as close to the wind as he could, rather than letting himself be pushed out to sea, where other enemy ships might be waiting. Hauling up to cross the Charleston bar, he passed within gunshot of the brig and fired one shot from the Long Tom, splashing water over the enemy’s quarter before running in.

  In Charleston he sold his New England produce for a good profit and took on 331 bales of cotton; he stood to earn $23,000 in freight and fees for delivering it to Bordeaux or any other port in France.

  They made it to the port of the small, miserable village of La Teste in thirty-seven days, seeing scarcely a sail and not a single man-of-war the whole way, surviving a furious gale in the Bay of Biscay that split open the planking and nearly threw the schooner on her beam ends, the next sea threatening to capsize her. The crew frantically threw two of the guns and the water casks overboard to lighten the ship, and got her running before the wind until a smooth moment came to wear onto the other tack and relieve the strain on the damaged starboard fore shrouds that might send the mast crashing down. The schooner rode literally leaping “from one sea to another” until steadying on the other tack. The day before Wellington’s army marched into La Teste on March 11, 1814, Coggeshall managed to get to sea again, holding a pistol to the head of the reluctant local pilot to persuade him to take the schooner out after he insisted the weather was too bad.27

  At daylight on the fifteenth the crew of the David Porter found themselves two miles to leeward of a large frigate. Coggeshall tried the same tactic he had used with his pursuer off Charleston, trying to lure the warship to leeward so he could quickly tack and get to windward. As before, the British ship refused to be drawn, and it seemed there might be nothing for it but to ply to windward, take a full broadside at pistol shot in passing, and hope for the best. But overruling the advice of his officers, Coggeshall decided to try to run before the wind, and with more adroitness and better seamanship than the George Washington’s captain had displayed in executing that maneuver in the same situation, and with a crack crew that knew how to pull off such a surprise, he ordered the square sail and studding sails readied to run up at the same moment when he gave the word. And then in a flash they were running to leeward, and the frigate took five minutes before she could get a studding sail set, in which time the David Porter had gained a clear mile. Everything they could sacrifice went overboard; all the water except for four casks’ worth was started and pumped onto the sails to keep them drawing as tight as a drum, all the sand ballast from the hold was thrown out, and by noon a good eight or ten miles separated them, and by four in the afternoon the frigate was a speck on the water.

  They were short of provisions—the baker at La Teste had been unable to provide them more than two bags of bread, and in a mix-up during the chase only two water casks had been spared—but the next morning, “to our unspeakable joy,” first light found them in the midst of a small merchant fleet out of England that had become separated from its escort in a gale a few days before. The first ship they captured was a brig brimming with provisions, and the schooner was soon bursting with hardtack, butter, hams, cheese, potatoes, and beer. They took three more ships before spotting, late in the afternoon, the same frigate that had chased them the day before. Coggeshall ordered the three prizes to hoist lanterns while he slipped away in the growing darkness, and “very soon after this, I heard the frigate firing at his unfortunate countrymen, while we were partaking of an excellent supper at their expense.”28

  Coggeshall turned over command of the schooner to his first lieutenant and remained in France to complete arrangements for a large purchase of wine in Bordeaux. The David Porter returned safely to Cape Ann later in the year, taking several more prizes on the way home and ten prisoners, which netted the owners $1,000 as a bounty from the United States government.

  Later that year Coggeshall, for his return voyage, took command of “a fine Baltimore built vessel … a remarkably fast sailer,” the letter-of-marque schooner Leo, lying in L’Orient harbor. For three weeks he skillfully dodged British men-of-war in the Bay of Biscay while taking several prizes, and then one afternoon there came racing across their weather quarter a prize to put all others to shame, an English packet just out of Lisbon, bound for England, almost certainly carrying a huge quantity of specie. Just as they were on a course to intercept within a pistol shot, the schooner gave a violent lurch and the foremast snapped in two places.

  The only hope now was to get into Lisbon, a neutral port, before the next morning; the seas were teeming with British warships. The Leo’s crew worked for an hour clearing away the wreckage and rigging a jury foremast, and by four o’clock in the afternoon they were making seven knots.29

  But with dawn and the Rock of Lisbon in sight the wind died. All day they swept and towed, and just as their hopes had risen again—four miles from land, the Lisbon pilot already aboard—Coggeshall saw coming out, on the ebb tide of the Tagus and a light land breeze, a thirty-eight-gun British frigate. In a matter of minutes they were under her guns, and prisoners of war.

  The frigate was the Granicus, and her captain, W. F. Wise, far removed from the growing brutalities of the American war, was of the old and chivalrous school; Coggeshall was given his own stateroom and was invited almost every day to dine with the captain, who was all manners and kindness, praising the seamanship and ingenuity of American sailors and shipbuilders, and more than once urging him, “Don’t be depressed by captivity, but strive to forget that you are a prisoner, and imagine that you are only a passenger.” At Gibraltar the crew was immediately shipped off to England, and Coggeshall and his lieutenants were to follow in a few days, once they had given the required depositions to the admiralty court. The governor of Gibraltar had received positive orders that every American prisoner brought in was to be forwarded to Dartmoor, without exception, and the officers were not to be paroled, despite Wise’s urging that they be treated civilly, all the more so since the Leo had voluntarily released some thirty British prisoners they had taken. “I said but little on this subject,” Coggeshall said afterward, “but from that moment resolved to make my escape upon the first opportunity.”30

  It seemed an even more impossible proposition than escaping from a prison hulk in the Medway, for Gibraltar was itself a citadel, with a guarded gate leading to the mainland. The first day Captain Wise said he was prepared to let Coggeshall and his officers attend the court proceedings without a guard if they pledged their parole not to attempt to escape. Coggeshall did so, and used the chance afforded by their stroll back to conduct an hour’s reconnaissance.

  The next morning they were to return to the court, and Coggeshall arose, put all t
he money he had—about a hundred gold twenty-five-franc pieces—in his belt, and slipped a few keepsakes into his pocket.

  “Well, Coggeshall, I understand you and your officers are required at the Admiralty Office at 10 o’clock,” Wise greeted him, “and if you and your officers will again pledge your honor, as you did yesterday, you may go on shore without a guard.”

  Coggeshall gave him a careful look and replied, “Captain Wise, I am surprised that you think it possible for any one to escape from Gibraltar.”

  Wise, pleasantly but firmly, said, “Come, come, it won’t do, you must either pledge your word and honor that neither you nor your officers will attempt to make your escape, or I shall be compelled to send a guard with you.”

  “You had better send a guard, sir.”31

  And so a lieutenant, with a sergeant and four marines, conducted the Americans to the office. While Coggeshall and one of his lieutenants were waiting in the courtroom for their turn to be examined, the lieutenant walked casually to the door, then urgently beckoned him over; the British lieutenant was not in sight. Coggeshall then cheerfully asked the sergeant if he would like to go up the street to the wineshop at the corner for a glass of wine with them while they waited. The sergeant thought it was an excellent idea and, leaving the rest of the marines, accompanied the two Americans up the street. The wineshop had entrances on each street; Coggeshall and the lieutenant went in one door, and while the sergeant waited there, Coggeshall slipped out the other after whispering to the lieutenant to follow and meet him two blocks over.

  Coggeshall removed the eagle insignia from his cockade, and with that gone, his blue coat, black stock, and black cockade “had, on the whole, very much the appearance of an English naval officer.” He waited with growing apprehension at the corner he had named, but the lieutenant did not appear. “I had now fairly committed myself, and found I did not have a moment to spare,” and so he set off with what he hoped was an attitude of “the most perfect composure and consummate impudence” toward the sentinel guarding the Land Port Gate. Fixing the guard with a stern glare, he strode on, received a respectful salute, and in a moment was outside the walls of Gibraltar. He went down to the mole, where a crowd of boatmen were all too eager to row him out to his ship; he chose one, hopped in, and as they got into the bay the oarsmen asked, “Captain, which is your vessel?” Coggeshall was at a loss for a moment, but seeing a Norwegian flag flying from one, he decided that the Norwegians were probably more trustworthy than most people and jabbed a finger toward it.32

  He decided that his best chance was to tell the truth, and he could scarcely finish his story before the Norwegian captain grasped his hand, said he had been a prisoner in England and would do anything to help him, and in two minutes flat had him fitted out in a pea jacket, fur cap, and pipe like any Norwegian seaman. The captain then gave him dinner and said he needed to go ashore for a few hours to arrange things.

  The Norwegian returned “pleased and delighted”: the whole town was in a state of pandemonium over the escape of the captain of the American privateer. The lieutenant of the frigate had been arrested. The next night a gang of smugglers came alongside silently in a long, fast-rowing boat and “certainly, a more desperate, villainous-looking set was never seen.” But the Norwegian captain had arranged everything; he did business with them all the time, selling them gin and other odds and ends; and the smugglers said they would be all too happy to take the “captains’ brother” to Algeciras, nearby in Spain. The water was smooth, the night dark, and the ten miles’ passage was a matter of two hours’ steady rowing. A lantern was shown for a minute, then covered; an answering signal winked from the shore; and then they were on land crunching their way up a winding track, and at about three in the morning they entered a small cabin, one room with a mat hanging in the middle as a partition. This was where the chief of the smugglers lived with his wife and two small children, and for three days the family took Coggeshall in warmly and kindly. Venturing out cautiously to see if there was an American consul in the town, Coggeshall was able to find his way to an initially disbelieving diplomat, but once he had doffed his fur cap and pea jacket and “looked somewhat more like an American” he was able to tell his story, and the consul—Horatio Sprague, who had been consul in Gibraltar before the war began—immediately invited him to stay with him and offered to help him on his way. After waiting ten days in hopes of hearing news from his two lieutenants, he hired a guide and mule and, dressed as a peasant to avoid the brigands, traveled over zigzagging mountain footpaths to Cádiz, where he arrived two weeks later, just before sundown, the sun’s final rays lighting the church steeples and the mountains beyond them in a burst of gold. He made his way to Lisbon on a coasting schooner, then to New York on a filthy and vermin-infested Portuguese brig, finally arriving home in May 1815 to learn that the war was over and peace had been restored. “I cannot leave this brig without warning my friends and countrymen never to take passage across the Atlantic in a Portuguese vessel of any description,” he wrote.33

  FOR THE five thousand less fortunate Americans who would be marched from Plymouth harbor during the year 1814 over sodden roads through rain and mist, Dartmoor Prison presented a paradox of leniency and misery. It was sixteen miles across the moors, and few of the men were in any condition to make the trek, deprived for so long of exercise in the prison hulks. The clay soil of the road would turn to “the consistency of mortar” in the steady rain, and many of the prisoners lacked shoes, while others lost them in the sucking ooze. “Our march might have been traced for several miles by the old boots, shoes, and stockings, which were left sticking in the mud in the hurry of the march,” wrote one American sailor. A file of British soldiers on either side prodded them on their way with bayonets while officers on horseback shouted orders to keep moving.34

  It was surreal to be on land again, but much about their imprisonment seemed to defy reality at times. The overcrowded old sixty-four that carried Benjamin Waterhouse and his companions from the Medway to Plymouth was commanded by a tyrannical captain who threatened to put any of the Americans in irons if they complained about the shortage of food and had one of his marines severely flogged for selling some of his own tobacco to a prisoner. But the lieutenant was humane, and after the captain promptly went ashore upon their arrival at Plymouth, Waterhouse was astonished at the flotilla of boats that put off from the shore filled with the hundreds of prostitutes of the town offering their accustomed trade to any arriving ship. Soon there were as many girls aboard as there were prisoners; the going rate was half a crown, scarcely fifty cents.35

  And then a week later the prisoners were trudging from seven in the morning to half past eight in the evening across a landscape seemingly as barren as the moon’s; a few of the seamen who simply were unable to take another step were thrown into the baggage carts as the ragged procession went on without a stop. Halfway there the guard was changed, a detachment from Dartmoor taking over, and the march, which had been steadily uphill, now became a steep climb, still with no halt for rest or food. One of Benjamin Browne’s messmates grew so fatigued on the march that he could no longer carry his overcoat and first tried to pay one of his companions to carry it for him, then even tried to give it away but could get no takers.

  The prison itself loomed “like some huge monster” through the mist. An eighteen-foot-high wall of solid granite blocks, a half mile long, surrounded the whole prison, with three guardhouses spaced around it. The arriving prisoners entered through a heavily guarded main gate, passed in and out of a courtyard that held the houses and offices of the commandant and surgeon, then through another gate in a fifteen-foot-high stone inner wall into a second courtyard and parade ground where the barracks and hospital buildings were, then finally through a gate in a twelve-foot-high iron palisade topped with sharp spikes, within which lay the actual prison buildings, seven in all.

  The prison barracks were three stories high, all built of granite as well, with single huge rooms on each floo
r slung with hammocks in tiers three high and a foot and half apart; the walls constantly dripped with moisture and the floors were icy, the only light coming from small windows covered with iron bars and wooden shutters that gave the prisoners the choice of pitch darkness or even more dampness from the cold and constant sea wind.36

  Most of the arriving prisoners had a similar tale to tell of their miserable first night at Dartmoor, cast onto a bare stone floor without bedding or dry clothes, their meager possessions not yet arrived in the slow-moving carts. One old man “amused himself and annoyed all others by singing a line of one and a verse of another of all the old songs he could recollect from his earliest boyhood” through the night, recalled one American sailor, but none were inclined to sleep anyway as hunger, aching limbs, and the hard floor overcame even their utter exhaustion.37

  The next morning a clerk accompanied by a squad of soldiers arrived to record the name, age, height, physical description, and place of birth of each of the prisoners (those records would incidentally provide one of the most complete demographic portraits of American seamen of the era) and then the men were turned out into the yard “to Receive hammocks beds and Blankets that was as full of Lice as the Devil is of Wickedness,” Joseph Valpey, a Salem privateersman, recorded in his diary. Guards with muskets patrolled a walk along the inner stone wall, and between the inner wall and the iron paling was the “cachot,” or “Black Hole,” a windowless stone hut where prisoners were confined for punishment.