The Shining Sea

by George C. Daughan

  The leading merchants of Essex County, Massachusetts raised half the money for their new frigate. Major contributions came from the fabulously wealthy merchant Elias Hasket Derby and from William (Billy) Gray, Jr., chairman of the Salem Frigate Committee. Each donated $10,000. The overall subscription raised $74,700. The total cost of the Essex, including her guns and stores, was $154,687. The government made up the difference.

  William Hackett, the well-known naval architect, designed the Essex. He also designed and built the Merrimack, the first subscription warship, in 1798, on the Merrimack River in nearby Newburyport, Massachusetts. Hackett was famous as the architect of the celebrated Revolutionary War frigate Alliance. Built in Salisbury on the Merrimack across from Newburyport, she was generally considered the finest warship in the Continental Navy. The Alliance and Essex were strikingly similar, although the Alliance was a bit larger. Both ships were fast.

  Enos Briggs of Salem took charge of building the frigate. He sought help from the citizens of Essex County in the Salem Gazette:

  Take Notice! Ye sons of freedom! Step forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French insolence and piracy! Let every man in possession of a White Oak Tree feel ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem, . . . where the noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the seas and make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them for knees and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel, which altogether will measure 146 feet in length, and hew 16 inches square. Please call on the subscriber, who . . . will pay the ready cash.

  The citizens of Essex County responded, cutting the great timbers for the ship’s hull in the wood lots of Salem, Danvers, Peabody, Beverly, Marblehead, and other nearby towns. Giant trees, felled by expert hands, dropped onto a cushion of snow, and after trimming, were dragged on sleds by teams of oxen through Salem with townspeople cheering as they lumbered by. Paul Revere contributed copper bolts, spikes, staples, and nails, but he could not supply the rolled copper for her all-important sheathing. That would still have to come from England. Revere did not begin his copper mill at Canton, Massachusetts, until 1800. Revere worked with navy agent Joseph Waters, who was responsible for seeing to it that building supplies and provisions, including shot for the carronades and other armament arrived in a timely fashion.

  Work progressed rapidly. The ship’s keel was laid in April 1799. The launching took place on September 30, 1799 (Revere attended); and she was ready to put to sea the third week of December. Small as frigates go, she displaced 850 tons, slightly more than half of what the largest American frigates, the 44-gun heavyweights, Constitution, United States, and President, displaced, 1,576 tons. (“Ton” was a crude measure of volume, not weight, derived by multiplying length in feet, times width, times depth of hold, and then dividing by one hundred. It was a rough measure by any standard, varying from shipbuilder to shipbuilder.)

  The Essex measured 141 feet in overall length, with a 118-foot keel, 37-foot beam, and a depth of hold of 12 feet 3 inches. Between her upper, or spar deck, and the gun deck below was six feet at the waist and six feet three inches under the quarterdeck. The height between the gun deck and lower deck was a cramped space of only five feet nine inches. She was built for speed and carried an impressive array of canvas, but her sailing was compromised later by changes made to her armament.

  Captain Preble officially accepted her into the navy on December 17, 1799. In his letter to the Salem Committee he noted that “her hull, masts, spars and rigging [were] complete, and [she was] furnished with one complete suit of sails, two bower cables and anchors, one stream anchor, one kedge anchor, one tow line, four boats and a full set of spare masts and spars, except the lower masts and bowsprit.”

  The Essex’s first mission was a challenging test. Captain Preble received orders to sail from Salem to Newport, Rhode Island. There he was to rendezvous with the 36-gun frigate Congress, under Captain James Sever, one of President Washington’s original frigate captains, appointed in 1794 when the president began the new Federal Navy. The Essex and the Congress were to proceed to the Sundra Straits and Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, where French privateers were harassing American merchantmen. After dealing with the French marauders, Sever and Preble were to shepherd home any American ships gathered at Batavia. Sever was senior to Preble and would be squadron commander.

  The two frigates would be the first American warships to round the Cape of Good Hope and sail across the Indian Ocean to the East Indies. They would not be the first American ships, of course. Merchantmen had been making voyages from the United States to the Far East since the 1780s—after the Revolutionary War ended. The first to make the voyage to Canton was the Empress of China, owned by Robert Morris of Philadelphia (the great financier of the Revolution) and a group of New York merchants. The Empress of China left New York on February 22, 1784. Elias Hasket Derby, who made a fortune as a privateer during the Revolution, was also quick to enter the China trade after the war, sending his ship the Grand Turk (a former privateer) to Canton in 1785.

  Early in the morning on December 22, 1799, the Essex stood out from historic Salem Harbor bound for Newport on the first leg of her long journey. The short trip to Rhode Island would be an excellent test for the new frigate, coming as it did in the dead of winter—a treacherous time to be sailing the North Atlantic, when the seas could be nearly as vicious as any in the world. Despite the season, Preble arrived in Newport without mishap in five days. “The ship proves a good sea boat and sails very fast,” he reported to Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert.

  To Joseph Waters, the navy agent in Salem, Preble wrote, “I arrived here [Newport] the 27th, experienced some blustering and much moderate weather on my passage, the wind generally contrary. The Essex . . . went eleven miles per hour, with topgallant sail set and within six points of the wind.” Looking back years later, Preble remembered the Essex as “a prime sailer and the best model of a frigate (of her rate) in the Navy.”

  On January 6, 1800, the Essex and the Congress departed Newport, beginning their long journey to the Sundra Straits. A powerful storm with high winds, snow, and hail dogged them the first four days, and the two frigates became separated. Powerful gusts stirred the sea into a frenzy, completely dismasting the Congress. She probably would have foundered had not moderating weather suddenly granted her a reprieve. With a prodigious effort from her crew, Sever was able to get up a jury rig. On February 24 the Congress limped into Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs. Preble, in the meantime, acting more swiftly and surely than Sever, saved his masts, rode out the storm, and continued on to St. Helena Island and the Cape of Good Hope. The contrast between the two ships and two captains could not have been more pronounced. Sever’s lieutenants accused him later of poor seamanship. A court of inquiry cleared him, but his reputation—never high to begin with—was hopelessly compromised, and he was soon forced out of the navy.

  On March 11, 1800, a little over two months after leaving Newport, Preble put into Table Bay off Cape Town. On the way he stopped at St. Helena, a rendezvous point that he and Sever had agreed upon in case they were separated. When the Congress failed to appear, Preble moved on. The Essex got a friendly reception from the British in Cape Town. They had seized it from the Dutch in 1795, after revolutionary France made the Netherlands a vassal state. When Preble arrived, the United States and Britain were both engaged in a war with France, and they cooperated to a limited extent when it suited their purposes. Britain had been fighting revolutionary France since January 1793; the United States had been enmeshed in its undeclared naval war with France since 1798.

  When the Essex pulled into Cape Town, she was in need of repairs and provisions. Preble had no trouble securing both. The repairs were extensive. Much of the iron work had given way; the fore and main crosstrees were broken due to defective wood; and the main shrouds and all the topmast stays, which wer
e of “infamously bad” quality, according to the captain, had to be replaced.

  For two weeks, while work went ahead on the ship, Preble joined in the social whirl that enlivened life on the many (mostly British) ships anchored in the harbor. He kept an eye out for Sever and the Congress but decided not to wait if they again failed to appear. When the Essex was ready to go, the Congress had still not arrived, and Preble left without her, sailing across the Indian Ocean to the Sundra Straits and Batavia, where he executed his mission with the élan for which he became famous.

  Although he failed to capture any French privateers (which he dearly wanted to do), he did protect American trade for two months, and then convoyed fourteen merchantmen back to the United States, arriving in New York on November 19, 1800. Unfortunately, Batavia was a disease-ridden hellhole, and Preble may have picked up some ailment there, or he might have just been suffering from a severe case of ulcers. Whatever it was, by the time he reached home, he was in far from vibrant health.

  After her return, the Essex was refurbished and participated fully in the war against Tripoli. A year after the war was over, she left the Mediterranean and sailed back to the United States, arriving on July 27, 1806. She was then placed in ordinary at the Washington Navy Yard, where she remained until February 1809. During that time extensive work was accomplished under the expert eye of the famous Naval Constructor Josiah Fox, who thought the Essex was a fine ship. He liked to point out that, “The white oak timber and plank with which this ship was built is superior in quality to any white oak I have seen made use of in the Navy. It appears to have been cut from trees, young and thriving.” When Fox finished with her, the Essex was in excellent shape, although she probably received her carronades during this time. Records verifying exactly what was done were lost when the British sacked the capital on August 24, 1814, and parts of the Washington Navy Yard, including warships, had to be destroyed to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

  David Porter took command of the Essex in August 1811, and he requested that John Downes be appointed first lieutenant. Porter’s relationship with Downes began in 1802 during the Tripolitan War, when Midshipman Downes served with Porter on the frigate Congress and later on the New York. Porter was impressed with Downes’s leadership qualities and his cool courage under fire. Downes was promoted to lieutenant in March 1807.

  In the late fall of 1811, Porter took the Essex on a shakedown cruise. On Christmas day he ran into an explosive storm that the ship handled with comparative ease. No matter how well she performed in dirty weather, however, Porter remained unhappy with her armament. And his unhappiness did not abate when the war began. His success in the early weeks of the conflict against the Alert and the other vessels he had captured did not change his mind about the Essex’s carronades.

  CHAPTER

  6

  FIRST RENDEZVOUS

  PORTO PRAIA

  THE TIME FOR CAPTAIN PORTER AND THE ESSEX TO DEPART the Delaware River and join Bainbridge in the Constitution and Lawrence in the Hornet finally arrived on October 28, 1812. Evelina Porter had known for weeks that this moment was coming, and she must have been dreading it. Saying goodbye to her husband was never easy, but this time it was particularly difficult. David was about to begin a voyage of indeterminate length that promised to be more dangerous than any he had undertaken before. Evelina understood to a degree the requirements of a navy wife in wartime, but this assignment would demand more of her than any had in the past. She had no idea when he would return, or, indeed, if he would; whether he would cover himself with glory or be disgraced. His courage and cunning in battle were legendary; he was a fearsome opponent, but he had outsized ambitions that could cloud his judgment. She must have worried that his prowess in combat might be compromised by an obsessive desire for fame. One thing she knew for certain; he’d pursue his dreams of glory without any regard for their effect on her.

  Evelina was standing on the manicured front lawn of Green Bank, the Porters’ imposing, graystone mansion overlooking the mile-wide Delaware River. Baby Elizabeth was in her arms, and son William was at her side, standing next to Captain Porter and Midshipman David Farragut—now eleven years old. Evelina was unaware that she was pregnant with their third child, who would be born on June 8, 1813 and named David Dixon Porter. It was possible, even likely, that Captain Porter would be far away when the baby arrived. “I sail on a long, a very long cruise,” he wrote to Hambleton, “it may be many months before you hear of my arrival in the U.S. . . . if you hear of me at all.”

  Green Bank would be of some comfort to Evelina while she waited for David to return. Situated in the middle of picturesque Chester, the mansion was the finest in town. Four and a half years earlier, Evelina’s father, Congressman William Anderson, had given it to the young couple as a wedding present. He probably thought that Evelina would need a comfortable place to raise her children while her husband was away at sea.

  The Essex was anchored in deep water near shore ready to sail. As slack tide approached, Porter gave Evelina and the children a final kiss. With Farragut at his side, he made his way down the long sloping lawn onto a small dock at the water’s edge, where the captain’s gig was tied up. As soon as he and Farragut were in the stern sheets, the coxswain shouted, “Shove off. Altogether now, give way.” Muscled oarsmen pulled into the river navy fashion, their oars striking the water in near perfect unison. In minutes the gig brushed up against the frigate’s massive black side, and a bowman hooked a painter onto the starboard main chains. Porter grabbed the ladder amidships and climbed up the side followed by Farragut.

  Bosun’s pipes squealed, as the captain in his working uniform passed through the entry port. A side party of marines and ship’s boys came smartly to attention. First Lieutenant John Downes rendered a formal salute, which Porter returned, before striding toward the quarterdeck, anxious to be underway. He did not waste time inspecting the ship and the crew; he knew Downes would have them well prepared.

  As the tide began to ebb, Porter weighed anchor and stood down the Delaware. They were heading for his rendezvous with Bainbridge and Lawrence, who had departed Boston two days earlier. It appeared that Porter would have no trouble meeting them. A favorable wind and tide carried the Essex swiftly past Wilmington and Newcastle. River traffic was increasing, and on every boat curious eyes were undoubtedly glued to telescopes examining the intriguing frigate.

  The river soon widened into Delaware Bay. As the Essex sped toward Cape Henlopen and the sea, Porter summoned the pilot, who had guided them down the river and bay, and was about to return to Philadelphia. As soon as the door of the captain’s cabin closed, Porter, without explanation, ordered the man to hand over any last-minute letters crew members had entrusted to him. After the surprised pilot produced the letters, Porter dismissed him and then examined each letter carefully, looking for usable intelligence about the Essex’s mission, particularly her destination. As it turned out, all the letters were innocuous notes to loved ones, except for one that gave the ship’s first place of rendezvous as “the coast of Africa.” Porter confiscated that letter and all the others without informing the writers. He would not allow anything to compromise his mission. That these were letters to loved ones from men who might not see them again seemed to matter little to him. His duty, as he saw it, was always paramount. Besides, the crew would never know that he had destroyed the letters.

  By nightfall, the Essex had moved beyond the Delaware Capes and was plowing into rising swells in the Atlantic. A sizable storm was getting up, intensifying with every turn of the glass. During the night the wind hauled around from north to west, and the weather thickened. Porter had to fight hard to avoid running onto the dangerous shoals at Chincoteague. On the morning of October 29, with the wind increasing to a gale, he put the ship under snug sail, and secured the masts by tightening the rigging, which, being new, had stretched considerably. The heavily laden frigate labored in the swollen seas. Her rolling opened waterways that flooded the berth
deck, soaking bedding and stores. Water filled the coalhole, and an additional leak appeared between cut-water and stem. The rest of the Essex remained tight, however, and by pumping only a few minutes every two hours, Porter kept the ship reasonably dry.

  The storm continued into the next day, and then let up, but the weather remained unsettled for another forty-eight hours. As soon as he could, Porter put the ship back in order, replacing oakum (fibers from old cordage treated with tar) in the waterways, drying clothing, airing out bedding, and salvaging stores. He even found time on October 31 to exercise the men at the guns.

  Despite the crew’s best efforts, so many provisions were lost that Porter was forced to ration what was left, except for water and rum. He hoped to maintain his supply of water by catching every bit he could in the rain awning. But he was forced to cut the bread allowance in half and reduce other provisions by a third. He never considered returning to port. The Essex was still in good shape, despite the hammering she had taken from the storm.

  THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS ARE 3,500 MILES FROM THE DELAWARE Capes. Porter estimated it would take the Essex a month to make the voyage to Porto Praia, the capital of the archipelago and the first point of rendezvous with Bainbridge. Of course, Porter hoped that enemy merchantmen or, even better, a warship would delay him. Once the weather eased on November 2, he shaped a course to strike latitude 36° 7’ north and longitude 58° 54’ west (northeast of the Bermudas), which would take the Essex across the track of enemy vessels bound to Europe from the West Indies.