by Hughes, Ben;
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Pen & Sword Maritime
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright © Ben Hughes 2016
ISBN: 978-1-47382-364-8
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Maps
Prologue: ‘A Prodigious Slaughter’: USS Essex, Valparaiso Bay, 6.30 p.m., 28 March 1814
Introduction: A Tale of Two Navies
1. ‘Yankee Warriors True’: Captain David Porter and the Essex, 1 September 1812 – 25 January 1813
2. The South Atlantic: USS Essex, 27 November 1812 – 25 January 1813
3. ‘A finer set of fellows’: Captain James Hillyar and the Right Revered HMS Phoebe, 27 December 1812 – 11 April 1813
4. Into the Pacific: USS Essex, 26 January 1813 – 11 April 1813
5. From Tenerife to Rio: HMS Phoebe, 12 April 1813 – 9 July 1813
6. The Galapagos Islands: USS Essex, 11 April 1813 – 9 July 1813
7. In the Footsteps of Robinson Crusoe: HMS Phoebe, 10 July 1813 – 6 October 1813
8. A Matter of Honour: USS Essex, 9 July 1813 – 2 October 1813
9. Tragedy at Tumbez: HMS Phoebe, 3 October 1813 – 10 December 1813
10. Death in Paradise: USS Essex, 4 October 1813 – 13 December 1813
11. The Valley of the Unknown God: HMS Phoebe, 24 November 1813 – 8 February 1814
12. The Standoff, 13 December 1813 – 28 March 1814
13. The Battle¸ 27–28 March 1814
14. The Aftermath, 29 March 1814 – 25 December 1814
Epilogue: Loose Ends, 7 July 1814 – 14 August 1870
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Captain David Porter. US Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland.
USS Essex. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
David Glasgow Farragut. National Portrait Gallery, Washington.
Commodore John Downes. Canton Historical Society, Massachusetts.
The Liberty of the Subject [the Press Gang]. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
The Essex capturing the Alert.
Capture of La Néréide by HMS Phoebe. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Captain James Hillyar. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Allen F. Gardiner.
Signatures of Hillyar and Ingram. Taken from the Phoebe’s Muster Roll, ADM 36/16809, National Archives, Kew.
Portsmouth Point. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
‘A Marine & Seaman fishing off the Anchor on board the Pallas in Senegal Road, jany 1795.’ National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Saturday Night at Sea. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
A nineteenth-century map of Rio de Janeiro.
Slave Market in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, c.1824.
Vista de la Bahia de Valparaiso. 1830. Museo Histórico Nacional de Chile.
Lima, Plaza de Armas. 1854.
Juan Fernandez Island.
Chile. 1744.
‘At daylight we saw a shoal of sperm whales.’ New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massachusetts.
Map of the Galapagos Islands. 1684.
Mouina. Chief Warrior of the Tayehs [sic].
Marquesan War Canoe.
Commodore Porter off Nuka Hiva.
USS Essex vs HMSs Phoebe and Cherub.
View of Valparaiso Bay. 2015. Author’s collection.
William Morgan’s General Service Medal. DNW Auctioneers website. http://www.dnw.co.uk/
Master’s Log Book, HMS Phoebe. Entry for 28 March 1814.
Memorial to the USS Essex, 2015. Author’s collection.
Preface: Behind the Hyperbole
In the United States the story of USS Essex’s commerce-raiding Pacific cruise, perhaps the most daring exploit of the War of 1812, is relatively well-known. The truth, however, has been blurred by the prevailing fabrications of President Madison’s incumbent Republican government and Captain David Porter’s self-serving memoir released soon after his return. As the Bostonian would have it, his mission, despite ending in the capture of one of the United States’ few remaining men-of-war and the death or mutilation of over one-third of his 300-strong crew, was a spectacular success. His claims of crippling the British whaling industry, making a fortune from captured prizes and diverting the Royal Navy’s over-stretched resources on a year-long game of cat and mouse, do not stand up to close scrutiny, yet still form the basis of the generally-accepted narrative told to this day in the United States.
In Britain, Porter’s story and that of the men of HMS Phoebe who defeated him is virtually unknown. Embroiled in a 23-year-long fight to the death with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the war with America was considered a sideshow. It received little attention from contemporaries and was soon all but forgotten. In modern times Patrick O’Brian revived the tale with his Jack Aubury novel, The Far Side of the World. Although a thin veil is cast over the story (USS Essex becomes USS Norfolk and the final showdown takes place off the Galapagos Islands rather than in Valparaiso Bay), O’Brian’s tale largely sticks to the facts, but his efforts have since been overshadowed by a recent Hollywood adaptation. Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World is an imaginative and entertaining amalgamation of naval lore, fact and fiction in which Russell Crowe stalks the Pacific seeking a French frigate rather than an American one.
In Pursuit of the Essex: A Tale of Heroism and Hubris in the War of 1812 aims to tell the true story. Dedicating equal coverage to the hunter and the hunted without regard for reputation, it immerses the reader in the world of the British and American seamen who struggled for supremacy in the sunset years of the Age of Sail. In compiling the narrative, I have exploited a variety of British sources hitherto untapped by the historians who have covered the subject. The National Archives in Kew and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich hold a host of primary accounts. The masters’ and captains’ logs of the British ships; secret coded journals intended for the High Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty; surgeons’ notebooks; ships’ musters and pay lists; courts martial records; and official correspondence, wills and personal letters penned by the chief protagonists all cas
t new light on the story as do several contemporary newspaper reports and the recently-published journal of Midshipman Allen Gardiner, an eyewitness to events from the moment HMS Phoebe left Portsmouth until the story’s bloody denouement in Valparaiso Bay.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my editor, Rupert Harding, for his professionalism, kindness and encouragement; my parents, Dave and Jane Hughes and Stephen W. H. Duffy, author of Captain Blakeley and the Wasp: the Cruise of 1814, for their help in proof-reading and correcting the draft; and my wife and daughter, Vanessa and Emily Hughes, for their love and support.
Maps
Prologue: ‘A Prodigious Slaughter’: USS Essex, Valparaiso Bay, 6.30 p.m., 28 March 1814
His ears ringing from the concussion of two hours of cannon fire, Captain David Porter surveyed the scene. Dozens of dead were strewn amongst his frigate’s shattered spars. On the quarterdeck the bodies lay in heaps around three dismounted 12-pounders. Cut down as they had attempted to return the British fire, some of the men had been decapitated. Others were disembowelled. Many resembled pincushions, their flesh pierced by clouds of jagged wooden splinters punched through USS Essex’s oak sides. Limbs had been torn from sockets, fingers severed, flesh ripped open to the bone. Brains spattered the holed and blackened sails. The stench of seared flesh and gunpowder lay heavy in the air. Shredded rigging lay limp amongst blocks shot from the tops and rivulets of blood ran off the spar deck, down the hatches and into the hold from whence the sound of exploding cartridges emanated.
As tears began to roll down Porter’s sunburnt cheeks, a handful of British deserters staggered out of the hatchways. Lowering two boats, they abandoned the ship to escape their compatriots’ imminent revenge. Others dived overboard. Dodging wreckage, they braved the currents on the mile-long swim ashore. Below decks two teenage midshipmen threw small arms through the open gun ports. Another sheepishly emerged from his hiding place, while Ruff, a negro boy, searched for his master. Some of the wounded bravely mouthed defiance. Others wept or called for their mothers or rolled overboard, seeking oblivion in the swirling brine.
Introduction: A Tale of Two Navies
At the turn of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy dominated the seas. Since the Seven Years War (1756–63), Britain’s European rivals had been struggling to compete and repeated crushing victories over the French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish during the French Revolutionary War and early Napoleonic period saw all claims to equality quashed. After Trafalgar, the service’s reach was all-encompassing: solitary cruisers patrolled the world’s oceans and tried and tested battle fleets could be mustered with relative ease in the Mediterranean and on both sides of the Atlantic. Such was the respect that the service commanded, that the surviving French ships-of-the-line would spend the rest of the war blockaded in their home ports. From 1805 to 1812, aside from a few frigate squadron encounters in the Indian Ocean, the most serious threat the British faced at sea was from the French privateers which infested the English Channel and the cays and inlets of the Caribbean.1
Equally ubiquitous in the early nineteenth century was the US merchant marine. Lacking the blessing (or curse) of internationally-desirable resources, such as sugar, slaves, silver or gold, but gifted with excellent deep-water harbours and an enterprising population, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the ports of New England grew rich through ‘the carrying trade’. Loading up with pork, beef, flour, rum and salted fish, the merchants of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island, sailed for the British colonies in the Caribbean. There the sugar monoculture employed on the plantations ensured American products fetched a good price.2 At Kingston, Port Royal, Bridgetown, Charlestown and Saint John’s the Americans loaded sugar destined for Britain where manufactured luxury goods were purchased for the North America market or guns, destined for the west coast of Africa, were stowed. In the Gulf of Guinea, off Cape Lopez or at the islands of Sāo Tomé and Principe slaves were loaded to fuel the plantations of the Caribbean where molasses, a by-product of sugar manufacture, was purchased to be transformed into New England rum, thus completing this cyclical and highly-lucrative trade. The shipbuilding industry of New England, boosted by access to the virgin timber of the vast American interior, prospered hand-in-hand with the colonies’ merchant class, while contacts with the British Caribbean saw the plantation system trans-located to Virginia and Carolina. In place of sugar, cotton and tobacco were grown.3
The European wars of the late seventeenth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries saw discontent arise between Britain and her transatlantic colonies. The North Americans saw no reason to stop trading with the French and Spanish just because London had declared them the enemy, especially when the molasses sold at Martinique, Guadaloupe and Hispaniola could be had for a third of the price demanded at Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis and St Kitts. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660, the Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1764, implemented to put a stop to such treasonous activities, merely led to a rise in smuggling and the seeking-out of legal loopholes, which in its turn, brought about the Royal Navy’s increasingly heavy-handed policing of North American trade. With their mercantile interests blatantly subordinated to the economic priorities of the mother-country, in 1775 the North American colonies rebelled.
At sea the War of Independence went badly for the Americans. Despite their shipbuilding expertise, the colonists had little experience of naval warfare and their fleet was hopelessly outnumbered. Of thirteen American frigates built during the conflict, seven were captured and incorporated into the Royal Navy and four were destroyed to prevent them falling into enemy hands. Unwilling to run the risk of trading on the open seas, the American merchants turned their hand to privateering. With fast ships and experienced seamen, they enjoyed some success. On land the Americans grew in confidence as the war progressed. Despite convincing victories at Long Island and White Plains, the British had since struggled to get to grips with an elusive enemy and between 1778 and 1780, with the entry of the French, Spanish and Dutch into the war, Westminster began to view the conflict as a lost cause and started channelling resources into the protection of her Caribbean colonies instead. In 1783 the United States gained its independence, while, with the defeat of the French Navy at the Battle of the Saintes the previous year, Britain’s all-important sugar plantations were retained.4
The post-war period saw a dramatic slump in the New England economy. Barred from trading with the British West Indies, whole seafaring communities went bankrupt. The shipbuilding industry suffered and a number of American sailors emigrated to Nova Scotia. Lured by financial incentives established by Westminster, some Nantucket whalers even crossed the Atlantic to set up business in London and Wales. To compensate, New England’s merchants sought fresh markets overseas. In 1784 the Empress of China was the first US vessel to trade at Canton. Others exploited the opportunities offered by a still-independent Bengal or braved the pirate-infested waters of the Mediterranean; trade consuls were dispatched to nineteen foreign ports and commercial relations were established with Sweden, Prussia, Russia and the Dutch. The response of the French, however, was disappointing. Despite being Revolutionary Washington’s principal ally, the trade policies of the tottering Ancien Régime mirrored those of Westminster. Instead of welcoming American vessels, Versailles established a restrictive system to protect the interests of her own merchant class.
Everything changed with the French Revolution. At first the resulting European conflict played into American hands. With the French mercantile fleet devastated by the Royal Navy, Paris relaxed its trading laws and invited the Americans to take up the slack. Exploiting a legal loophole known as the re-export trade, New England’s merchants were able to carry cargoes between France and her Caribbean colonies by stopping en route at American ports to briefly unload then re-stow the goods. In this way their cargoes could be reclassified as US products and therefore avoid confiscation by the Royal Navy. The US merchant fleet rapidl
y expanded, forcing its captains to take on an ever-increasing number of foreign, principally British, hands to whom they could offer wages in excess of what they would receive at home. A knock-on effect was that the Royal Navy believed itself increasingly justified in stopping and searching American vessels and pressing men whose nationality was suspect onto her men of war.5
In 1794 the situation changed once more. Worried that their policies were pushing the Americans ever further into the French orbit, the British agreed to trading concessions with the Jay Treaty. The terms saw US bottoms return to Britain’s Caribbean colonies, in exchange for Washington’s acquiescence in Westminster’s anti-French naval policies. Anglophile at heart, appalled by the barbarities of the Reign of Terror and firmly believing that America’s future would be fuelled by ocean-going trade with Britain and her colonies, the New England merchants were only too happy to oblige. The issue of impressment, however, remained unaddressed and as a result of the treaty an undeclared conflict known as the Quasi-War broke out in 1798 between the US and Revolutionary France. Fought entirely at sea, the conflict saw the rebirth of the US Navy. Supported by a number of armed brigs and sloops, the force was built around a dozen solidly-constructed and superbly-crewed frigates. The largest, which could outgun any ship of their class including those of the Royal Navy, mounted 44 guns, were built of exceptionally resilient live oak and boasted broadsides of heavy 24-pounders. Although small in number, the US Navy was highly efficient, her officers scored several morale-boosting victories in the Caribbean against French privateers and men of war and in 1800 the Quasi-War was brought to a negotiated close as the result of the more conciliatory stance adopted by the new French government led by Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul.
In February 1801 Thomas Jefferson became the third President of the United States. As a Republican, his sympathies lay with the Southern landowners. He favoured inland expansion, opposed overseas trade, distrusted the Anglophile New England merchant class and discouraged the growth of the navy. Many promising young officers went on furlough into the merchant trade as a result, but within months of Jefferson’s appointment, the US found herself at war once again. This time her opponents were the Barbary States of North Africa: petty princedoms financed by piracy which had been a thorn in the side of Mediterranean trade for 500 years. While North American merchants had previously enjoyed the protection of the British flag, since independence US ships had been targeted and the late 1790s and early 1800s saw several highly-publicised cases come to light.