In Pursuit of the Essex

by Hughes, Ben;

  The First Barbary War saw the US Navy grow in experience and prestige. As the enemy’s pirate galleys and feluccas were no match for the Americans’ men of war, blockading, bombardment and cutting-out operations were the order of the day. The US performed well: a number of ships were captured; a young lieutenant named Stephen Decatur McKnight emerged with particular credit, receiving rapid promotion as a result; and the Bashaw of Tripoli was eventually forced into a negotiated settlement which saw the lucrative Mediterranean trade reopened to US shipping. Things were not entirely one-sided, however: the squadron’s most powerful frigate, the 44-gun USS Philadelphia commanded by Captain William Bainbridge, ran aground while chasing two enemy ships into Tripoli harbour. Although Decatur McKnight later destroyed the Philadelphia in a daring night-time raid, her crew, which included a young lieutenant named David Porter, were only released at the conclusion of the conflict in June 1805 on the payment of a $60,000 ransom.6

  Four months later, the Battle of Trafalgar dramatically altered the balance of global naval power for a century. With French impotence at sea matched by the British army’s inability to challenge Napoleon on land, both sides implemented policies to cripple their opponents economically. In May 1806 the British government placed the European coast between Brest and the Elbe under blockade, thus prohibiting neutral nations from shipping produce from France’s colonies to her home ports. Napoleon responded with the Berlin Decree in November, excluding British trade from mainland Europe. One side-effect was a major disruption to the neutral carrying trade. By 1807 the US in particular was beginning to suffer. Combined with the Royal Navy’s aggressive stance towards neutrals suspected of trading with France and the continuation of impressment, the governments of Britain and America became increasingly polarised. President Jefferson hit back by banning British imports, but this policy backfired: Britain was not about to let herself be influenced by the protestations of a ‘minor nation’ when engaged in total war. The end-result was an increase in smuggling and a rebellion which broke out along the US Canadian border where Jefferson’s countrymen relied on international trade.7

  In June 1807 the pressure intensified. Ordered to the Mediterranean to protect the US’s mercantile interests, Captain James Barron of USS Chesapeake was intercepted by a British frigate a few miles east of his home port of Hampton, Virginia. The commander of HMS Leopard, Captain Salisbury Price Humphreys, had received intelligence that several Royal Navy deserters were amongst the Cheaspeake’s crew. When Barron refused to allow the British to search his ship, Humphreys fired a warning shot across his bows. When this failed to have the desired effect, the British fired three broadsides in quick succession. Never suspecting that he would face combat so close to home, Barron was hopelessly unprepared and only managed to loose off a single cannon shot in return before striking his colours. Three Chesapeakes were killed and fifteen wounded. Going on board, the British identified four deserters. One was hanged, the others imprisoned.8

  The Chesapeake–Leopard affair caused outrage. In Norfolk, Virginia, a mob prowled the streets looking for Royal Navy officers to lynch; the press called for war; the militia and inshore gunboat fleets were mobilised; President Jefferson demanded all British ships leave the US seaboard or face an embargo; and the American men-of-war cruising the Mediterranean were recalled for national defence. Barron was court-martialled in October. Found guilty of negligence and want of judgement, he was suspended for five years without pay. The British press was equally bullish. ‘Three weeks blockade of the Delaware, the Chesapeake and Boston Harbour would make our presumptuous rivals repent of their puerile conduct’, The Morning Post opined. The leading officers of the Royal Navy stood to make a fortune from US prizes, while the country’s merchant class was keen to see their transatlantic rivals humbled. Admiral Sir George Cranfield Berkley, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s North American Station at Halifax, also pressed for action to cow the ‘upstart Johnathons’, but eventually calmer heads prevailed. Westminster remained focussed on the threat of Napoleonic France, while the US was split between hawkish southern Republicans and the powerful merchant class of the Federalist states of New England who loathed the idea of entirely losing British trade.9

  In 1809 James Madison was elected President. Putting an end to Jefferson’s embargo, Madison presided over a partial economic recovery, but the relationship with Britain remained strained. In 1811, with the US once again moving into the French orbit, two British ambassadors were obliged to retire from Washington in quick succession. The American representative at the court of Saint James’ followed suit and Madison enlarged the US Navy from 1,440 to 2,000 personnel and ordered four frigates to sea. Meanwhile, the third British ambassador to serve in Washington in a single year made it clear that his country had no inclination to concede ground on neutral trade restrictions and in May 1811 a second violent encounter occurred on the high seas. On the night of 16 May USS President, one of the country’s ‘super’ frigates, spoke HMS Little Belt, a 20-gun sloop, off the Virginia Capes. With neither captain willing to identify himself without first knowing the name of his interrogator, a stalemate ensued. Accounts of who fired the first shot vary. The result was never in doubt. At 10.30 p.m., having had nine killed and twenty-three wounded and most of her guns disabled, Lieutenant John Creighton of the Little Belt struck his colours. A diplomatic spat ensued, but as both Commodore John Rodgers of the President and Lieutenant Creighton refused to accept responsibility, the question was left unresolved.10

  In November 1811, the Republican War Hawks gained the ascendency in Congress. Henry Clay, a charismatic Kentuckian who, at thirty-five, was too young to remember the horrors of the War of Independence, called for an increase in naval spending and an attack on British Canada which he blamed for inciting Indian attacks in the Northwest Territories. Former president Jefferson opined that the Canadians would be happy to join the US and claimed that the conquest would be ‘a mere matter of marching’. Madison backed the Hawks and in April 1812 announced a ninety-day embargo against British products to enable US merchantmen to return to their home ports prior to war. The British government, for its part, remained opposed to the conflict. Defeating the French remained the priority; rioting Luddites required 10,000 troops to be deployed at home; the recent assassination of the anti-American prime minster, Spencer Percival, had robbed the country’s hawks of their leadership, while Percival’s successor, Lord Liverpool, favoured peace. Neutral trade restrictions were relaxed and a move made towards conciliation. The news reached the US too late, however. Congress had already voted to go to war and on 18 June the bill passed through the Senate.11

  Few in Britain took the threat seriously. Many thought that Madison’s declaration of war was mere bluster and that a truce would be called once news of Liverpool’s policy changes reached Washington. In the Royal Navy’s North American Station, Vice-Admiral Herbert Sawyer, Berkley’s successor as commander-in-chief, was wary of antagonising the enemy and ordered all captured US merchantmen released pending instructions from London. Anticipating a windfall from prize money, Sawyer’s junior officers were more bellicose, but their overblown sense of confidence and lack of respect for their new rivals would prove their undoing in the opening two years of the war. Interestingly, the officers of the US Navy would labour under their own psychological shortcomings. Desperate to prove themselves the equal of their highly-rated opponents, the Americans would throw themselves into the fray without due consideration of the impact on their country’s wider strategic goals which, due to their numerical disadvantage, required a more patient, measured approach.12

  The Royal Navy’s overconfidence was mirrored in the British press. In a piece of rhetoric as provocative as it was ill-informed, The Evening Star dismissed the US Navy as nothing more than ‘a few fir-built frigates … manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws [with] … striped bunting flying at the mastheads’. Nevertheless, such an attitude seemed justified when word of the initial land exchanges across the
Canadian border reached London. Rather than the matter of ‘mere marching’ envisioned by Jefferson, the opening moves saw the senior US general, William Hull, a Revolutionary War hero who was well past his prime, surrender with 2,500 men to a British force of redcoats backed by militia of just a little over half his strength, while Fort Michilimackinac on Lake Huron was captured by the Governor-General of Canada, Sir Isaac Brock, without a single British casualty. Brock’s success not only brought an important fur-trapping concern under British control but also assured the allegiance of the region’s powerful Indian chieftain, Tecumesh and his numerous followers.13

  By sea the initial exchanges followed a different course. Having convinced Madison that the US Navy’s best chance was to take the war to the enemy, Commodore John Rodgers set sail from New York on 21 June. Amongst his five-strong squadron were two of the service’s 44-gun ‘super’ frigates: USS President and United States. Rodgers’ mission, to intercept the 110-strong British West Indian convoy as it made its way east across the Atlantic, would ultimately prove frustrating, but before he returned home USS Essex and Constitution, captained by David Porter and Isaac Hull respectively, would score the first of several stunning successes won by the US Navy in the first two years of the war. Porter’s cruise of the Caribbean saw him take several British merchantmen between Bermuda and the Grand Banks and capture the sloop HMS Alert on 13 August. The Essex then sailed for the Delaware River where she arrived in early September having narrowly avoided a British blockading squadron led by Captain Philip Broke of HMS Shannon. Isaac Hull, meanwhile, had set sail from Boston on his second cruise of the war on 2 August intending to meet up with Rodgers’ squadron in the mid-Atlantic. On 17 August, about 750 miles east of Boston, he sighted HMS Guerriere under Captain John Dacres, lately detached from Broke’s squadron to return to Halifax for resupply. The two frigates closed rapidly. Displaying the over-confidence which typified British officers, Dacres assured his men that the contest would be won within thirty minutes. He was proved correct, but it was Constitution which emerged victorious. In a bloody encounter, Guerriere was shattered by 24-pound American shot while her own 18-pounders had comparatively little effect on Constitution’s solid live-oak sides. By the time Dacres struck, twenty-three of his men had been killed and fifty-six wounded. Guerriere was so badly damaged that Hull had little option other than to set her on fire after taking Dacres and the rest of the survivors on board.14

  September saw a new commander-in-chief arrive at the Royal Navy’s North American Station. Although Vice-Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren had been issued with orders to ‘attack, sink, burn or otherwise destroy’ enemy shipping, he had also been told to seek peace: his first official act was to write to President Madison offering an armistice. The move was indicative of the lack of direction behind British policy. With Warren’s hands tied, it would be some time before the full weight of British naval superiority would be brought to bear on the enemy. Meanwhile, the US Navy, unhindered by such considerations, was preparing for the second phase of the war. The fleet would be divided into three squadrons for commerce raiding. Commodore Rodgers would take the 44-gun President and the 38-gun Congress to cruise the Caribbean; Commodore Decatur would sail off the Cape Verde Islands and Azores with the USS United States and the brig Argus; while Commodore William Bainbridge would take the Constitution, supported by Captain Porter in the Essex, to the South Atlantic. It would prove the beginning of one of the greatest naval cruises of all time.15

  Chapter 1

  ‘Yankee Warriors True’: Captain David Porter and the Essex, 1 September 1812 – 25 January 1813

  Throughout the autumn of 1812, the Pennsylvanian village of Chester was alive with activity. At anchor in the Delaware, the black bulk of USS Essex, an 850-ton Fifth Rate frigate, was preparing for her latest cruise. By the quayside, Lieutenant John Gamble’s marines kept guard as boats rowed back and forth with provisions. Flocks of geese splashed down near Chester Island in mid-river and some of the Essex’s 319 crew threw fishing lines into the sluggish brown waters to hook the white perch, catfish, shad, herring and giant sturgeon with which the Delaware abounded. Three hundred barrels of salt beef and salt pork, 200 gallons of vinegar, 100 barrels of molasses and quantities of anti-scorbutic lime juice were stacked in the Essex’s hold. Nearly 22,000lbs of hard tack filled the bread room and 1,700 gallons of spirits was packed in the liquor store. In the warrant officers’ storerooms on the orlop deck were ten boxes of spermaceti oil, seventeen of tallow candles and 50lbs of nails. Hundreds of gallons of paint, turpentine and varnish, sewing twine, fishing lines, fire buckets, barrel hoops and soldering irons had been squeezed on board; coal for the galley stove and forge was loaded and 500lbs of musket balls, a thousand flints, 100lbs of slow match, seventy cartridge bags, hundreds of roundshot, grapeshot and canister and several thousand pounds of powder were stacked in the magazine. Fresh fruit and vegetables were stored in net bags hanging from the rigging and each of the ship’s messes had penned chickens and tethered pigs on the spar deck for their private supply.1

  Built fifteen years earlier by Enos Briggs of Salem, Massachusetts, to the design of Captain William Hackett, the Essex was a ‘tight little’ craft. One hundred and thirty-eight feet in length, with a beam of 37 feet and a draft of 12 feet 3 inches, she dwarfed the cutters, barges, shad boats and two-masted shallops circling around her. Unlike the original six frigates, which had been funded entirely by the government, the Essex had been partially built by public subscription. Half of the $150,000 required had been raised in Essex County on the back of a wave of patriotism inspired by the outbreak of the Quasi-War. Elias Hasket Derby and William Grey, the two principal shipping merchants in town, had donated $10,000 each. The government had made up the shortfall. The 53-year-old Briggs was at the height of his powers when he began work in April 1799. After laying down a 128-foot keel cut from four mighty white oaks at Winter Island, Briggs placed an advert in The Essex Gazette calling on all ‘true lovers of liberty’ to supply the rest of the materials. The response was swift. Spruce and pine were cut for the spars, masts and decking. White oak was felled for the knees and structural supports in the wood lots of Danvers, Peabody and Beverly and dragged to the yard on ox-drawn sleds through the winter snows. Local hemp was used for the cables and rigging and the sails were cut from duck at Daniel Rust’s factory in Broadstreet. Malleable copper spikes were obtained from Colonel Paul Revere while copper plating to protect the frigate’s hull from barnacles, shellfish and the dreaded teredo, a wood-eating ship worm of tropical climes, was imported from England. At midday on 30 September ‘the Stars and Stripes were unfurled on board’ and, to the sound of a salute fired by the frigate’s cannon arrayed on a nearby hill and the applause of a crowd of 12,000, the Essex was launched into Salem Sound.2

  Thirteen years later, Captain David Porter, a darkly intense 32-year-old, was in command. Born in Boston into a seafaring family, Porter had grown up on his father’s tales of sea-faring derring-do and had made several voyages to the West Indies as a merchant sailor in his teens. After twice escaping impressment by British men-of-war, he joined the US Navy in 1798, securing a midshipman’s commission during the build-up to the Quasi-War. ‘My son … is just entered his nineteenth year’, his father wrote, ‘he is active and promising … [,] understands navigation well [and is] a tolerable good scholar otherways.’ Porter’s first posting – midshipman on the 44-gun frigate USS Constellation – was under the fiery Captain Thomas Truxtun, a former merchant captain who had rounded the Cape of Good Hope three times and made a name for himself as a privateer in the Revolutionary War. ‘Swear at you?’ Truxtun had bellowed after Porter had complained about the harsh discipline on board. ‘Damn it, sir, every time I do that you go up a round on the ladder of promotion … Go forward and let us have no more whining.’ Porter took Truxtun’s advice to heart.3

  On 9 February 1799, eight days after his nineteenth birthday, Porter had his baptism of fire. Cruising the Caribbean during the Qu
asi-War, the Constellation took on L’Insurgente, a frigate of 36 guns, six leagues northeast of the Island of Nevis. In the chase L’Insurgente’s main topmast was brought down by a squall. Principally armed with carronades and therefore reliant on forcing a close-range encounter, Captain Michel-Pierre Barreaut found himself at the mercy of Truxtun’s long 24-pounders. In an hour and a quarter the American had hammered L’Insurgente into submission. With his ship wallowing and his decks littered with twenty-nine dead and forty-one wounded, Barreaut struck his colours, giving the US Navy its first significant prize of the war. Porter was amongst those charged with bringing L’Insurgente and her 173 surviving crewmembers into the neutral harbour of St. Kitts, an achievement that helped bring about his promotion to lieutenant. Eleven months later Porter once more demonstrated the bullheadedness that would characterise his career. As second officer of the 20-gun schooner USS Experiment, the twenty-year-old was escorting four merchantmen when they were attacked by Haitian pirates. As his superior, Lieutenant Maley, countenanced surrendering, Porter assumed command and saved the Experiment and two of her charges. Maley, a long-term malingerer, was dismissed from the service. Porter was praised for his aggression and initiative, attributes which he possessed in spades.4