Mad for Glory

by Robert Booth

  England, long at war, had the ability, by diplomacy or by force, to devour much of the faltering Spanish empire in the western hemisphere. The English, however, were not popular with the people in general or the rebel leaders in particular. A few years before, British troops had invaded Buenos Aires only to be defeated—a matter that could not easily be forgotten by either side and one that Poinsett constantly exploited, contrasting America’s peaceful commerce with Britain’s warmaking. More recently London, despite claims of friendship toward the rebels, had made an alliance with the royalist junto in Spain. Consistency and honesty meant little to the English ministers of state as they pursued their larger goal, which was outright victory in this interminable, winner-take-all world war.

  The Buenos Aires junto—the independent government’s executive council, which pretended loyalty to the Spanish king, Fernando, so as not to invite an invasion—had no love for the British, and welcomed Poinsett as the secret representative of the still-neutral United States. So well did he do his work, so thoroughly did he compromise relations between the junto and the British, that the name of Poinsett was known and reviled in London as well as in Madrid and Rio de Janeiro. When the moment came for public recognition, he convinced the junto to acknowledge him before receiving any British officials. He advised on regulations for maritime commerce that gave Americans the exact same rights and privileges as the British, and he convinced the junto to outlaw the impressment of sailors by Britain’s Royal Navy—an outcome that infuriated his opponents.

  In late May 1811, Roberts Poinsett received a letter from the new secretary of state, James Monroe, appointing him consul general of the United States for Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru. The promotion made a huge difference: Poinsett emerged from the shadows and assumed the status of an ambassador—without a staff, embassies, or stations, but with enormous prestige. Secretary Monroe assured him that “the disposition shown by most of the Spanish provinces to separate from Europe and to erect themselves into independent states excites great interest here. As inhabitants of the same hemisphere, as neighbors, the United States cannot be unfeeling spectators of so important a movement.”

  Consul General Poinsett saw his role in the broadest terms, anticipating the moment that the United States became a combatant in the ongoing world war. And when that should come to pass, Poinsett had advised President Madison, he expected the United States to intervene on behalf of any deserving rebel state with both material support and recognition of sovereignty.

  The Madison administration, without a formal position on South America and its independence movements, had not yet recognized the nationhood of Buenos Aires and its United Provinces. In the hope of forcing these issues, Poinsett urged Secretary Monroe to adopt a policy encouraging Creole revolution throughout the continent. In a letter dated October 24, 1811, he outlined his ideas and relayed his concern that the United Provinces could not defend itself from the likely assaults of European empires—it needed support from regional allies and the United States itself. Poinsett admitted that he had taken his own advice and counseled the Buenos Aires junto to form “an alliance of all Spanish America” and to “solicit the aid and protection of the United States and make one great simultaneous movement of the whole continent” toward independence. If the Creoles won their freedom in southern Spanish America, Poinsett wanted to be sure that the United States, and not Britain, would become their champion. With that in mind, he had decided that he had done all he could in Buenos Aires, and that the rumors of upheaval coming from Chile suggested that it was time to extend his mission to the Pacific.

  Soon after posting the letter, Poinsett hired a carriage and guides and began a 600-mile crossing of the Patagonian pampas to the western outpost of Mendoza and then the high passes of the Andes. If Secretary Monroe and President Madison were surprised at Poinsett’s aggressive tone or his decision to head west, there is no record of it. Evidently they did not try to respond, knowing that he was carrying out the duties they had agreed to and was now beyond their reach. In fact, Consul General Poinsett would receive no official communications during his entire tenure in Chile.

  Although Poinsett knew he was risking his career, he believed in the mission and in his ability to thwart the British on the Pacific side. It was an audacious thought—to set himself against the resources of a well-established world empire with large naval bases, highly effective diplomats, and a willingness to arm and assist rebels. But Roberts Poinsett had seen Napoleon in Paris, and he knew what one man could do.

  *Joel Poinsett received his early classical education from the excellent James Hamden Thomson of Charleston, a graduate of Princeton and a native of Abington, Massachusetts.

  *Maltby Gelston of New York, son of the collector of customs there, was their first choice.

  Chapter Three

  Against the Gods

  In June 1812, despite London’s efforts to prevent war and over the opposition of the New England states and the Federalist Party, Congress, with President Madison’s assent, declared war on Great Britain. America had a standing army of 6,000 men and a navy comprising just seventeen deepwater vessels.

  The United States was now a combatant nation in the world war, aligned, in effect, with Napoleon and his allies against the British. The timing could not have been worse, as Napoleon chose that moment to begin his doomed invasion of Russia, which, within a year, would put him on the defensive everywhere in Europe and leave London free to deploy its military resources to other theaters, such as North America, where its navy was capable of enforcing an unbreakable blockade and where its armies, made up of veterans of Wellington’s victorious forces in Europe, could easily defeat untested American soldiers.

  America was no match for imperial Britain. The nation was only half-formed. Most of the inhabited sections ended well east of the Mississippi River. Florida and Texas belonged to Spain, and California and the Pacific Northwest were up for grabs among Britain, Spain, and Russia. The states were not united, and the regions did not agree. New England was so strongly anti-war that there was talk of secession in seaport taverns, and Massachusetts refused to allow federal forces to operate within its boundaries. Nevertheless, with commercial shipping at a wartime standstill, many New England vessel owners joined those of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans in converting the best of their merchant vessels into privateers. Licensed by the government as warships and upgraded with a few cannon on deck and swivel guns on the rails, these privateers were sent out to capture British merchant vessels and cargoes to be sold in American ports.

  Much hope and very little money or materiel went into this new conflict. All of the rosy assumptions would prove incorrect. Those who thought a war would give the United States a chance to take Canada from Britain had not reckoned on the Canadians’ fighting spirit nor on a British invasion of American coastal cities. Such unthinkable developments would become realities, and America’s leaders had no plan to turn things around and save the country.

  The army performed poorly in the early going, but the U.S. Navy excelled. Porter’s initial cruise in the thirty-two-gun Essex, among the smallest of the navy’s twelve frigates, was a success as he led his 300 men in capturing several British merchant vessels and an obscure Royal Navy ship, the Alert. It was the first naval victory of the war for the United States, and Porter would have won real fame had it not been for the U.S.S. Constitution and her men and master, Captain Isaac Hull, who, one week after Porter’s victory, vanquished the British battleship Guerriere in spectacular style. The hero’s laurels went to Hull, leaving Porter to look to the next cruise for his chance at glory.

  In September 1812, at his riverside estate, Green Bank, on the Delaware below Philadelphia, Captain David Porter raged around the house, terrifying his family and servants. He was furious that the navy’s vessels were no longer allowed to freelance; instead, the ships had been organized into three squadrons under Commodores Stephen Decatur, John Rodgers, and William Bainbridge, each in com
mand of two frigates and a smaller vessel. Bainbridge, commanding the Constitution, forty-four guns, was to be accompanied by Porter in the Essex and James Lawrence in the new sloop of war Hornet, mounting twenty-eight guns. Constitution and Hornet were to sail from Boston, and Porter was to sail from the Delaware and join them at sea. But when? Although he had long been ready to sail, he could not get the Navy Department’s clearance for departure. It was almost as if the naval high command had lost its will to fight as bad news came in from the west and north: the largest American army had surrendered at Detroit, and another army had been repulsed in Canada.

  For the first time since 1783, war was the central fact of America—a war being fought on American soil and along its borders and shores, threatening to place America back under the control of the English king and to undo the gains of twenty years of expansion, settlement, and generally positive relations with the Creeks, Cherokees, and other big Indian nations. America was losing the war, and its frontier was soaked in blood. With the British inciting many of the Native American tribes, southerners and westerners were given an excuse to slaughter Indians and take their lands, but many in the east and north were already thinking that Congress and President Madison had made a colossal blunder. Having forfeited all support in New England, Madison was in trouble. The war hawks, however, wanted to keep fighting, even after the big defeats out west and the British naval blockade of North and South America, and even though Napoleon had lost his main army in Russia and might soon lose his hold on Europe, leaving Britain the undisputed champion of the world.

  Porter, ravenous for combat, took out his anger on his men, who were confined on board the Essex, moored within sight of his residence. Weeks passed. Overcrowded and heartily sick of themselves, the sailors smuggled booze on board and stayed drunk, which did not solve their basic problem. Their stir-crazy warden stared out at the river’s stillness and at the frigate, inert and skeletal, seeming to grow larger and darker and more immobile, a prison ship moored a few miles from the pleasures of Philadelphia.

  Porter’s antipathy for Secretary of the Navy Hamilton led him to suspect the secretary of incompetence, timidity, even cowardice, and he was not completely wrong. Hamilton had argued in Madison’s cabinet for keeping naval vessels in port until springtime rather than risking losses, but President Madison had rejected his advice and dropped him from the council of war. Unaware of this, Porter slatted around in his rooms, smoldering with wild thoughts, exploding at his wife, writing red-hot letters to a friend alleging that “the neglect of the Department is unpardonable: three days after my arrival, I would have sailed with three months’ provisions [but] I have yet received no orders” and no approval of his proposal for “a first campaign” against British commerce. With paranoia striking deep, Porter had more than one enemy in this war.

  Marooned in his house, consumed with loathing, he persuaded himself that the navy secretary was a traitor. If so, Porter concluded that he was not bound by his orders and restrictions and might use his own “discretion,” as he put it, in carrying on his part of the war.

  If his own high sense of honor had earned him only disrespect, he thought, he might as well act less honorably and more in his own interests, like everyone else, and especially like the privateers he had scorned. It was still possible to “carry into execution the plan that once gave so much pleasure to the Secretary,” but which had later been dropped. Porter took it up again, secretly, with the intention of making his fortune. Noting the arrival of more British warships on the blockading stations, he foresaw disaster for the navy in the Atlantic theater. The secretary, he predicted, would keep them holed up in the harbors until winter—a prospect that justified “a change in our Department, or we never can expect to do anything except on our own responsibility. . . .” Going rogue, however, was not an approved option for a U.S. Navy captain.

  David Porter (1780–1843), captain of the U.S. frigate Essex, began his fighting career as a teen-aged midshipman. Valued for his bravery under fire and his ferocious intensity, he was contemptuous of his Navy Department superiors and dangerously ambitious. (from Analectic Magazine, Philadelphia, 1814; D. Edwin engraving from Wood painting)

  Finally he received from Bainbridge a set of orders that Hamilton confirmed shortly after. In elation and relief, Porter wrote in a letter that “in two or three days I sail on a long, a very long cruise; our destination and intended movements I am not at liberty to divulge—perhaps a more important cruise was never undertaken by the vessels of any nation, and I have vanity to believe that my plan for the ‘first campaign’ produced it—it may be many months before you hear of my arrival in the U.S., and if you hear of me at all I hope the accounts may not be unfavorable.”*

  Whatever Porter’s hopes, Bainbridge was the author of the squadron’s final plan, which involved getting away from the coast and the Royal Navy in order to have the best chance of capturing British merchant vessels.

  Bainbridge and Lawrence cleared Boston on October 26 and headed east to rendezvous with the Essex at Porto Praya in the Cape Verde islands, off Africa. Failing that, Porter was to meet them at specified islands off the coast of Brazil on certain dates; then, if still apart, he was to proceed easterly to St. Helena off South Africa to prey on English merchantmen returning from India.

  It was a good plan, but it was not what Porter had in mind.

  On October 28, Porter bade farewell to his pregnant wife Evelina and their toddlers, William and Elizabeth. Resplendent in the bright uniform and gold epaulets of a captain, he strode across the lawn of Green Bank, accompanied by David Glasgow Farragut, eleven years old and wearing the outfit of a midshipman. A pulling boat took them out to the frigate Essex.

  The sailors, informed that this cruise would be a long one, had been allowed to make extra purchases with part of their first-cruise prize money. Like most navy crews, this one had been recruited mainly from among dry-docked merchant seamen looking for a berth. Of the 319 men, 31 were marines under twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant John Marshall Gamble, and most of the rest had the ratings of boy, landsman, seaman, ordinary seaman, or supernumerary. There were a boatswain and his mates, a gunner and his mates, and seven each of quartermasters and quarter gunners. There was a master at arms, an armorer, a sailmaker, a steward and cook, a carpenter, a coxswain, a cooper, and a captain’s clerk, Melancthon W. Bostwick. Porter was assisted by First Lieutenant John Downes, Second Lieutenant James P. Wilmer, Third Lieutenant James Wilson, acting Fourth and Fifth Lieutenants William Finch and the very near-sighted Stephen Decatur McKnight, sixteen, chaplain-teacher David P. Adams, purser John R. Shaw, surgeon Robert Miller, and sailing master John Glover Cowell, twenty-five, who had two mates. The twelve midshipmen, ranging in age from eleven to twenty-one, were the special responsibility of the captain, and one or two might be promoted to the rank of acting lieutenant during the cruise.

  Cowell, from the north-of-Boston port of Marblehead, was the rare navy man who had spent time in the Pacific—three years in his teens on board a Boston ship engaged in the otter-pelt trade with the Pacific coast, the islands of Oceania, and, ultimately, China. The son of a privateer of the Revolution—as was Porter—Cowell had seen the Essex being built in 1799 across the harbor from Marblehead at Salem, a world-famous seaport and the seat of the county of Essex.* Married with two children, well-traveled in Europe, Cowell was as eager for promotion as Porter himself had been; ambition drew the two men together. Cowell had come late to the navy, signing up as a sailing master in 1809 after his career as a merchant sea captain had been blocked by Jefferson’s embargo on overseas trade and then by the French assault on American shipping. On board the Essex, he was chief navigator, supervisor of sail trimming, accountant for provisions, and keeper of the log and charts. He was also a petty officer, which meant that he was subject to the command of much younger commissioned officers. Cowell, however, was not to be trifled with; he looked like the salty deck-boss he had been, strong and sturdy, wearing his long, dark hair in a pi
gtail, sporting a gold hoop in his left ear. He had the unswerving loyalty of his six fellow Marbleheaders, among Porter’s best crewmen, including Joseph Thomas, captain of the maintop,† who was chief, aloft, for the setting and taking in of the ship’s many sails. Captain Porter encouraged Cowell and assigned him competent master’s mates, but there was no guarantee of promotion. Cowell had written to the navy secretary that “the many mortifications incident to the situation of [Sailing] Master loudly demand that I should aspire to a more dignified situation.” Porter understood and valued those aspirations, but even more, he valued Cowell’s experience in the Pacific.

  Unlike most commanders, Porter cared about his men and tried to create a supportive community on board what was in many ways a prison. Porter was entirely responsible for meeting the basic needs of those who were giving up their liberties and most of their rights in order to live en masse and under surveillance, dependent on the captain and officers for the quality of their lives and often for life itself.

  He overloaded the Essex with stores and did not skimp on anti-scurvy fruit, vegetables, and lime juice. Disease, he knew, was the enemy; he dreaded an outbreak of sickness that could spread like fire through a ship at sea. Porter had three doctors on board, each a trained surgeon. He had dumped nine “incurables,” although a tenth, William Klaer, suffering from severe liver problems, had accidentally stayed on. Others passed muster despite sprains, ulcerated legs, and syphilis. Like any other vessel of its day, the Essex was a vast sink of microbial infection, with dozens of latent diseases, Western and Asian, afflicting the men. It was up to Porter to create and enforce the conditions that would prevent a ship-wide epidemic from which there was no escape.