by Robert Booth
Tilbury House Publishers
12 Starr Street, Thomaston, Maine 04861
800-582-1899 • www.tilburyhouse.com
First hardcover edition November 2015
ISBN 978-0-88448-357-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-88448-416-5
Copyright © 2016 Robert Booth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952705
Text designed by Janet Robbins, North Wind Design and Production
Cover designed by Jon Friedman, Frame25 Productions
Printed in the USA by the Maple Press, York, PA.
15 16 17 18 19 20 MAP 5 4 3 2 1
Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the notebooks, 1945
This life mask of David Porter was made in 1825, eleven years after he lost the USS Essex in the bloodiest naval fight of the War of 1812. His face still bore a large right-cheek scar earned not in battle, but in the streets of Baltimore during his escape from a mob. (Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York; gift of Stephen C. Clark, N0215.1961; photograph by Richard Walker)
In memory of my father
Robert A. Booth
1922–2000
Pacific navigator, famous handicapper
Contents
Prologue
1.Captain Porter
2.Consul General Poinsett
3.Against the Gods
4.Off the Chart
5.Revolution in Chile
6.A New America
7.Americans at War
8.A-whaling
9.Opotee in Nooaheevah
10.Taipi
11.Rendezvous
12.Victory
13.Consequences
14.Rancagua
15.Reverberations
16.Minute Guns
Sources
About the Author
Prologue
On the afternoon of March 13, 1813, while running past a desolate stretch of Chilean shoreline, the square-rigged U.S. frigate Essex has the misfortune of losing her main topsail yard. Her captain, David Porter, intent on making an impressive entrance at the port of Valparaiso, orders his battleship hove-to.
That night, after repairs are made, the Essex rides at anchor in the gentle swells of the western ocean and Captain Porter sleeps soundly, dreaming of the British whalers that he has come so far to capture, a fleet of them, slow and awkward and full of oil, easy prey for a mighty battleship. Waking in the dark, striking a match, he is convinced that the moment has arrived. He wakes his lieutenant and gives orders, and by sunrise 300 men are at their battle stations and the Essex is bowling along under full sail.
Taking up his spyglass, Porter searches the horizon in the morning brightness, seeing only the azure line and low clouds in the distance. Confident, he keeps his vigil by the hour, until his men start muttering and his officers are exchanging glances. Finally, betrayed by his dreams and the empty sea, the scar-faced little captain gives it up and sets the Essex on a course for the coast under English colors. The mariners soon spot fishing vessels and know that they are close to their destination, but when a signal is sent aloft to summon a pilot, the local skippers stay away.
The Essex sails on, trending northeasterly. In the distance are a couple of huts and some cattle on a coast “skirted by a black and gloomy rock, against the perpendicular sides of which the sea beats with fury.” Farther inland, the country appears “dreary beyond description: yellow and barren hills, cut by torrents into deep ravines.” This stark foreground to the blank immensity of the Andes is far from Porter’s long-held fantasy of “handsome villages and well-cultivated hills” beside a beautiful blue Pacific.
Rounding the next barren bluff, the Point of Angels, Porter seeks some sign of the elusive port of the Valley of Paradise. He scans a long sandy beach, then a mule-train zigzagging its way down a hill, then “in an instant afterwards, the whole town—shipping with their colors flying, and the forts—burst out, as it were, from behind the rocks”: Valparaiso at last.
But Porter sails too close to the cliffs, and the frigate’s sails luff as she suddenly decelerates. With a rush of paranoid dread, he realizes that his error has left them helpless “under the guns of a battery prepared to fire into us.” Seconds pass in silence as the Essex glides slowly on, until a breeze fills her topgallants and starts her back on her way. Evidently the English flag is a sufficient shield, for she sails unmolested toward an “animated” scene in the harbor, which includes a deep-riding American brig with her yards and topmasts struck, and a big “clumsy-looking” English vessel that Porter imagines to be “a whaler repairing her damages after her passage around Cape Horn.” Then he spots several large Spanish merchant ships preparing to depart, perhaps for Peru; if they recognize him, they might inform the English up the coast.
Porter roars at his lieutenant, John Downes, to put the helm down and send the Essex back out to sea, and in four windy hours they are thirty miles away, staring at another vista of “sun-burnt hills” dotted with cattle. Upon reflection, however, Porter realizes that this too is wrong. Callao, some 1,400 nautical miles north—the port for Lima, the Spanish viceroy’s royal capital—is the more dangerous port, so he reverses course for Valparaiso, and when the Essex reenters the bay she is flying her true colors, the Stars and Stripes.
Porter knows that the Spanish officials will not be happy. He has brought a new war with him, that of the upstart United States against Spain’s ally Great Britain; he is endangering the peace of Chile, a quiet country slumbering by the ocean. But he needs provisions for his 300 men and for the dozens of British sailors whom he is holding prisoner down below, some in irons.
Porter has brought his ship around Cape Horn unauthorized, bent on a private mission of wealth and glory. Ignorant of conditions in the Pacific world, he has no idea that Chile is in revolt, that its people will regard him as a savior, and that he is about to encounter the only other American official in the Pacific, Joel Roberts Poinsett, U.S. consul general for Southern Spanish America.
Chile’s fateful gravity has drawn Porter and Poinsett into the presence of three other remarkable figures: José Miguel Carrera, the heroic leader of the revolution, seeking support for his embattled government; José Fernando de Abascal, the Spanish viceroy at Lima and virtual monarch of western South America, sworn to crush the rebellion; and Captain James Hillyar of the Royal Navy, sent out on pain of death to win Chile for Britain. As these men and forces converge, the longtime peace of the somnolent Pacific will be shattered, and systems and cultures will collapse under the massive violence imported from the Atlantic world.
But none of that is apparent as the Essex approaches Valparaiso. Captain Porter, thirty-three, and Consul Poinsett, thirty-four, have traveled thousands of miles by very different routes to come face to face here. Porter has embarked upon the longest, strangest cruise in naval history; Poinsett is deeply involved in creating a new nation. The self-reliance of these men is impressive and typically American. No other country could have produced (or empowered) people so certain of their ability as individuals to effect change on a massive scale.
Porter is a ruthless buccaneer and Poinsett a romantic idealist, but each considers himself a patriot and an agent of destiny. The Pacific is not a theater of the larger war nor even understood to be an area of American strategic interest, yet these two young men, a navy captain and an ambassador, both operating well beyond the chain of command, will become the godfathers of all subsequent United States imperialism and na
tion-building.
Chapter One
Captain Porter
In his Baltimore boyhood, David Porter Jr., small and skinny, was his mother’s favorite, much given to playing pirate and reading about the freebooters of the Spanish Main and the more recent explorers of the Pacific. Despite his interest in books, he was not destined for college or the countinghouse, and so received only a grammar-school education. From their hilltop home, where his sea-captain father had set up a marine signal tower, David could see the tall ships coming up the Chesapeake and imagine their adventures on all the seas of the world.*
That pleasant dream ended in 1796 when he was thrown into the hardships of merchant seafaring at the age of sixteen. He worked as a deckhand for his father, a pugnacious former navy man and privateer of the Revolution, aboard a small trading schooner manned by five other crewmen. On his first voyage to the Caribbean—the West Indies of rum, sugar, and molasses—the boy participated in a horrifying battle with an armed cutter of the British Royal Navy. The Americans, without weapons, resorted to throwing knives and belaying pins at their opponents, who fired guns and cannon into the vessel, killing two of David’s new friends. In three later voyages, he met with more gunfire and brief imprisonment. He concluded that the world was harsh and violent, to be met with greater violence, and he developed a hatred of the English that convinced Captain Porter to enroll his scrawny son as a midshipman in the navy.
Porter had grown up in a post-revolutionary country facing westward. While the nations of Europe engaged in a war for world domination beginning in 1793, the United States had enjoyed an exemption. Neutral America was free to pursue its own prosperity and growth at the expense of Native Americans but otherwise without interference. People poured through the western valleys into the new lands of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, clearing wilderness and planting farms. At sea, things were not so gratifying: for a few years in the 1790s, Yankee shipping was subject to predation by the navies of the two main combatants, England and France.
As a world player with no part in the world war, America found that its neutrality had serious consequences abroad. Both Napoleon Bonaparte—leader of a November 1799 coup that had made him first consul of Revolutionary France—and the English under King George attempted to draw America into the conflict as an ally and to block its ability to render assistance to the enemy. President Thomas Jefferson, happy to purchase the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803, was unwilling to encourage alliances or build up an oceangoing navy. His main goal was to preserve America as the land of peace and plenty and to foster the populating of the western lands.
There was one exception to Jefferson’s strategy of peaceful neutrality, and that was the limited war with the Barbary States of North Africa. It began in 1801 and was conducted by the navy to make the seas safe for American merchant shipping in the Mediterranean. During this conflict, as in the recent naval quasi-war with France, young David Porter stood out. Most of his fellow middies had been raised in well-to-do families with some degree of gentility and refinement, and they had none of his experience of the harsh realities of seafaring. Their tendency to hesitate and reflect found no analogue in Porter’s rash temperament. He showed great courage under fire and was wounded in action at sea and on the shore.
He was on board the frigate Philadelphia with Captain William Bainbridge when she ran aground at Tripoli and had to be surrendered, with all of her men given up and incarcerated for more than a year. Cheerful amid the general dismay and depression of imprisonment, Porter was much admired for teaching navigation to the boys and for improving his own abilities. From officers who were much better educated than he, Porter learned French, drawing, and elegant handwriting, crowned by a highly stylized signature that would ornament all of his future correspondence.
Lieutenant Porter emerged from his early years in the navy as a fierce fighter with a short fuse, a good seaman and leader of men, intrepid and decisive. His superiors liked him, peers feared him, and men followed him proudly. Away from war zones, he worked hard to meet the navy’s expectations of an officer and a gentleman. Sometimes, though, trouble seemed to follow him. Returning briefly to his hometown of Baltimore, he was sent by the navy on a nighttime foray into the sailor’s district of Fell’s Point to recruit—or, more accurately, to impress—young men into the service. Things went wrong, and Porter killed a popular tavern keeper while trying to fight his way out of a mob. With his face torn open, he ran to the docks, leaped into a boat, and rowed off into the darkness.
Navy officials protected their headstrong young officer, although his temper remained a liability. Back in the Mediterranean, on a Sunday in a crowded harbor, Porter, then commanding a small cruiser, ordered his men to kidnap a mouthy British seaman. He had the man strung up in the rigging for a barbaric public flogging, an action that nearly started a battle, if not a war.
Later, while on Mediterranean joint maneuvers with the Royal Navy, he reined in his Anglophobia sufficiently to cultivate a friendship with an older British captain at Gibraltar, James Hillyar, and his kindly wife and sweet children. “Visiting them frequently,” Porter, for the first time in years, experienced the pleasures of domesticity. For the Hillyars, Porter wrote, “I entertained the greatest respect; and among the American officers generally no officer of the British navy was so great a favorite as Captain Hillyar.”
After 1806, when Britain achieved uncontested dominance of the seas, America’s ship owners lost their protected monopoly of the world’s freight. In the absence of any blue-water American navy, England and France were both free to implement policies inimical to American shippers. London promoted British maritime commerce and employed the Royal Navy, with a thousand vessels of war, to carry out a policy of harassment toward Americans.
Returning to America in 1807 after a long spell overseas, Porter, twenty-seven, fell in with a group of Manhattan writers who adopted him as their much-admired “Sindbad.” Their leader, Washington Irving, who would go on to become first among American authors, was then publishing the satiric magazine Salmagundi and had just bestowed the name of Gotham upon New York. In barrooms and on rambles into the countryside with these new friends, Porter found himself flattered as the man of action and experience, able to hold his own in their quick-witted company. His companions validated his efforts at self-improvement and encouraged him to write a book about his naval adventures in the tradition of Captain Cook and the buccaneers—a thing no American seaman had yet done.
Duty soon called Lieutenant Porter away from New York. Recommitting to the navy, whose numbers had been reduced in time of peace, he evidently felt that marriage would help him to advance in his career. Impulsively, he pursued Evelina Anderson, seventeen, the daughter of a well-connected hotelier of Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Courting her against her family’s wishes, he finally won over her parents and took his prize. Soon after the wedding, Porter was promoted to the rank of commander and assigned to run the naval station at New Orleans, a desk job in a seamy city on the edge of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. Porter’s widowed father went with the couple. Overstating his scientific qualifications, Porter persuaded the secretary of the navy to sponsor an exploring expedition on the way to New Orleans. They traveled 800 miles over hills and down rivers in the spirit of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—whose already famous expedition into the Louisiana Purchase had departed in 1804—but, as it happened, without any of the results.
At New Orleans, Porter’s father died of sunstroke and the senior Porter’s friend George Farragut lost his wife to yellow fever. Commander Porter stepped in to adopt the suddenly motherless ten-year-old James Glasgow Farragut, renaming the boy David after himself and turning him into a naval midshipman who would be his constant companion for years to come.
Porter had little patience with bureaucracy and was happiest when chasing smugglers along the coast of West Florida, now Alabama. His capture of some notorious privateers earned him federal bonus money and a large r
eward allegedly posted by merchants in Havana. The former would prove very difficult to cash in, and the latter would become an elusive obsession; both would feed his resentment of the navy secretary.
He left New Orleans as soon as he could, in 1809. Excited by reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and perhaps aware of American adventurer William Shaler’s published description of California and the weakness of its Spanish defenses, Commander Porter thought he knew how to make himself most useful to the United States: by realizing his dreams of exploring the Pacific.
Since Captain Cook’s voyages in the 1760s, the Pacific Ocean had called to mariners and entrepreneurs intent on discovering the possibilities of a new world. By the 1780s, British and American merchants were sending ships to the Pacific Northwest to trade with the Aleut, Tlingit, Chinook, and other Native peoples for glossy otter pelts. These beautiful furs, taken west across the ocean, turned out to have great value in China and spurred lucrative businesses run primarily from Boston and London.
At the same time, the whale-oil barons of the Massachusetts island town of Nantucket were sending ships and men into the Pacific—the South Sea that Spain considered its own. Their relentless pursuit of sperm whales, largest and most oil-rich of the cetaceans, yielded immense profits. Not to be outdone in seafaring or moneymaking, London merchants had their own strategy for the Pacific: they enticed large numbers of Nantucketers to relocate to England and serve on British whaleships.* Spain, Russia, Britain, and the United States all made claims on the Pacific coast of North America, but none had yet explored and mapped it thoroughly, inventoried its resources, or colonized its territory. With the European world preoccupied by war, Porter saw a great opportunity for America to fulfill its manifest destiny and for himself to become a national hero.