by Robert Booth
For two days on the waterfront, Purser Shaw tried to scrounge a small supply of beef, bread, flour, and rum. On board the Essex, the beef proved to be spoiled, so the sailors threw it overboard, “and shortly afterwards an enormous shark, at least 25 feet in length, rose alongside with a quarter of a bullock in his mouth.” Porter was aghast: the man-eater was as large as a young whale. “It would be impossible,” he wrote, “to describe the horror that the voracious animal excited,” as it churned the waters where men had been swimming the evening before.
The shark proved to be a mariner’s omen. The master of a recent arrival reported that the mighty Montagu had captured a twenty-two-gun American corvette and was pursuing her consort, a frigate. Three more British warships had taken some American privateers, he said, and others were on their way; but Americans had captured a convoy of British Indiamen and a packet with a great deal of specie on board—likely, thought Porter, a reference to his own capture of the Nocton.
Judging from these rumors, Porter suspected that the Montagu had made a prize of the sloop-of-war Hornet and that Bainbridge and the Constitution were on the run. He decided to clear out. That night, January 25, he freed five prisoners, gave up on two runaway crewmembers, and made all sail for the open ocean—but not before being overtaken by death. While laying out on the yard to unfurl the mainsail, seaman Samuel Gross fell to the deck and suffered terrible injuries. Gross, one of the best and most popular sailors on board, died a few hours later, and the long-declining Edward Sweeney, sixty-four, ship’s livestock tender, also expired. Santa Catarina seemed a good place to leave behind.
Porter was still short on provisions. He had blown his various rendezvous and knew nothing certain about the fate of Lawrence and Bainbridge. He left a letter for his colleagues, closing, “Should we not meet by the first of April, be assured that, by pursuing my own course, I shall have been actuated by views to the good of the service, and that there will have been an absolute necessity for my doing so.” Once at sea, Porter made the move that he had been considering all along. He headed south toward Cape Horn, bound for the Pacific.
Since boyhood, Porter had been reading, thinking, and fantasizing about the Pacific and the great fame and greater riches that awaited those who saw its possibilities—adventurers like old Lord Anson, chief of the English intruders in Spanish waters. Seventy years before, in 1741, with Spain and England at war, Commodore Anson had rounded Cape Horn and staggered into the western ocean with only his flagship Centurion and two others. Despite a fatal outbreak of scurvy among his men, he had managed to sack several ports in Chile and Peru before heading home across the Pacific. In the Indian Ocean he had captured the largest Spanish galleon of the Manila treasure fleet. In London, laden with a fabulous fortune in silver and gold, he had received a hero’s welcome, elevation to the peerage, and appointment as high admiral of the Royal Navy.
Lord Anson seemed a living presence to Porter: rival, provocation, and inspiration. The Pacific still sparkled with the promise of riches, and it was clear to Porter, if to no one else, that the nation’s future lay in the far west. His boyhood imaginings remained vivid, his Pacific dream as powerful as ever. The blindness and stupidity of superiors could not diminish his belief in the power of one vessel pursuing a fateful opportunity.
Somehow, during many years of global conflict, no one had thought to make the Pacific a war zone. Hunters who had no thought of being hunted, the fabulously lucrative British sperm-whaling fleet plied their bloody trade. Porter’s idea was to make them his prey in the ocean of peace. It seemed brilliant. At minimal risk to the Essex, he could pillage his way north through the whalers, then escape into the farther oceans of the setting sun. Porter alone, it seemed, could see a world for the taking. If his superiors couldn’t see it, they had no need to know.
With 300-plus loyal and unwitting men, Porter made the decision to leave it all behind: America, the navy, the chain of command, and the Atlantic world of war, history, knowledge, and civilization. Already well south of the last seaport of the continent, he put the Essex on a due southerly course, and his men started talking. During two more days on the same heading, the mystery deepened. Some made a guess and gathered their woolens. By day three, Porter could no longer conceal his intentions, and he called the whole crew to the spar deck. Before their expectant faces, under the straining towers of canvas, he made a brief speech.
“Sailors and Marines! A large increase in the enemy’s force compels us to abandon a coast that will neither afford us security nor supplies; nor are there any inducements for a longer continuance there! We will, therefore, proceed to annoy them where we are least expected!
“What was never performed by a single ship, we will attempt!
“The Pacific Ocean affords us many friendly ports! The unprotected British commerce on the coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico will give you an abundant supply of wealth; and the girls of the Sandwich Islands shall reward you for your sufferings during the passage around Cape Horn!”
The sailors roared their approval, all in favor of getting rich and enjoying orgies in the Pacific. Although they had not signed up for this cruise, and they were not sure what Porter meant by attempting what no ship had ever performed, they trusted their fiery leader with their lives.
Having read about the islands of Terra del Fuego, Porter stood clear of the treacherous coastline. He had to, because he had no sea chart or coastal chart, only a very small-scale map, an emblem of his extreme recklessness and self-destructive tendencies. As they entered the colder latitudes near Le Maire Strait, the atmosphere grew hazy and the wind blew hard. The men would need to be at their best, alert and strong and steeled to their duty, and so, just as he faced the most difficult feat of navigation in the world, Porter was terrified when a dozen sailors fell ill. An outbreak of scurvy would force him to turn back with a prostrated crew. Porter had done all he could to prevent it by fumigation, sanitation, and diet. In taking on his last provisions, he had acquired plenty of fresh fruit and onions, and he had distributed daily doses of vinegar to every man. Porter and his officers speculated with Doctor Hoffman; perhaps it was only cholera morbus, from bad food, or painter’s colic, from lead in the rum. The specter loomed over the Essex for a day and a night, but the sailors’ affliction did not spread.*
On they plunged into ever-higher seas and colder winds, sailing a course well east of any land, but then, in horror, they saw evidence that they could not be on the open sea: a flock of storm-buffeted geese, masses of floating seaweed, a wicked rip in the current, each a fatal sign of a lee shore. Porter posted men, reefed topsails, and strained his gaze into the storm. Suddenly, snarling white breakers appeared, and then headlands, low and dark, less than a mile away. Porter instantly changed course hard to the eastward, but thirty-foot waves met them head-on, burying the deck and jolting the vessel so hard that they thought she would come apart. The whole ocean, he wrote, “from the violence of the current, appeared in a foam of breakers, and nothing but the apprehension of immediate destruction could have induced me to have ventured through it.”
Jolted by cresting waves and with no room to jibe, they could only try to tack the ship onto a different course. Orders were screamed into the roar of the gale; men scrambled up the ratlines and fought their way out onto the main yard to unfurl the huge mainsail. The helm was put down, the Essex swung crashing through the seas, and, with a sound like the crack of doom, the sail filled and the frigate leaped forward on the other side of the wind.
Porter had the topgallant yards sent down and the jib and spanker set to get driving close-hauled, but then the jib exploded in tatters, leaving the Essex unable to point. With night coming on, with “a tremendous sea and the wind directly on shore,” and with “no prospect of saving the ship but by carrying a heavy press of sail to keep off the lee shore,” Porter bet everything on setting more sails, and the men responded with their lives to their leader’s commands. Essex, carrying far too much canvas, powered her way west-northwest,
defying disaster from moment to moment, seemingly an extension of Porter’s will, speeding and groaning across the wind even as huge waves pushed her toward shore. Porter fixed his gaze on the topmasts, strained to the utmost and likely to let go at any moment, which would have knocked the Essex off the wind and instantly wrecked her, killing every man on board. He kept up his vigil in the gale, and the Essex held course for nearly an hour until suddenly it was over; the wind and seas died away, sperm whales appeared alongside, puffing and gamboling, and “at half past seven, to our unspeakable joy, the land was discovered ahead” about a mile distant. They had entered the safety of Le Maire Strait.
Porter was amazed at his good fortune. Navigating without a chart, mistaken in his position, he had come through the breakers only by virtue of his crew’s superb seamanship, the incredible strength of the vessel’s spars, and a large amount of sheer luck. Had he been north of Cape St. Vincent as he had supposed, “it would have required our utmost exertions, under the heaviest press of canvas, to have kept the ship from going on shore; and the loss of a single spar, or the splitting of a topsail”—the snapping of a topmast—“would have sealed our destruction.” Destruction would also have befallen them had he been able to hold his original course, which was certain to have “entangled us in the night with the rocks and breakers,” for he “could not have seen the danger 100 yards from the ship.” He had nearly lost his vessel and drowned all of his men; he could not have come closer without actually doing it. Yet they had pulled through, and his crew gave him all the credit and loved their captain more than ever.
Shaken, probably imbibing freely in his cabin, he wrote the story twice in his journal, once while it was occurring and once while reflecting on it, processing the trauma as if he needed to keep telling himself that he had actually survived. “Thanks to the excellent qualities of the ship,” he wrote, “we received no material injury, although we were pitching our forecastle under [the waves].”
Verging on the Pacific and all it meant to him, Porter felt little of the elation that he had anticipated. He knew—unlike his men—that the Essex had just become the first U.S. Navy vessel to enter the Pacific, which would put his name in the history books, but his satisfaction was undercut by obsessive thoughts about ravening scurvy and murderous storms and, for the last time, about reversing course and perhaps sparing himself a hanging. Even in his journal—which he was writing for publication, should he survive—he admitted that, “I was departing from the letter of my instructions, and in prosecution of a plan which might not prove successful or meet the approbation of my commanding officer, or the Navy Department; and, however justifiable my conduct may be, the apprehensions of censure could not otherwise than produce their effect on my mind.”
His scheme was his own; he had not shared it with anyone. In truth, his rogue mission could be excused by only one outcome: extraordinary results against the British. Porter knew that any degree of failure would likely end his naval career and might well result in prosecution for the treasonous act of running off with a battleship in the middle of a war.
After a few days of westering into the Pacific, the Essex headed north in fair weather. One pleasant morning the sky suddenly turned dark, the wind freshened, and once again they encountered a gale out of the west, strong enough to appall “the stoutest heart on board” with “a fury far exceeding anything we had yet experienced, bringing with it such a tremendous sea as to threaten us every moment with destruction.” The frigate tossed so violently that no one was able to cross the deck, and Porter, badly hurt from several falls, retreated to his cabin. John Cowell and the chief officer, Lieutenant John Downes, were left to manage the ship and rally the men.
The Essex saved them once again. After three days of the most severe abuse, she had not “received any considerable injury; and we began to hope, from her buoyancy, and other good qualities, we should be enabled to weather the gale.” By March 5, finally beyond the influence of Cape Horn, they enjoyed fine breezes from the south. Wide-spanned albatrosses glided along on the wind. In the distance, above the shoreline, shone the white summits of the Andes. The men looked around at their new world and its great ocean, and praised the Lord.
In this crisis as in all others, Porter remained a stoic, without a God to watch over and preserve him. In his journal, as, presumably, in his conversation, he neither invoked a deity nor expressed any of the pious beliefs typical of the times. He was alone and unsponsored, and when he prevailed, he had only himself and his excellent vessel to thank.
The island of Mocha was their first stop in the Pacific. Twenty miles off the coast, it stood alone, rising from seas often full of sperm whales, chief among them the notorious Mocha Dick, an albino bull fully seventy feet long and famous for smashing whaleboats. For two decades the whalers of Britain and America had arrived at the island hoping for the glory of “subduing the monarch of the seas,” and one day, many years later, the furious whale would be fictionally matched with a godless captain in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
After a brief spell ashore, Porter sailed for the island of Santa Maria, hoping to get news about the enemy before proceeding to Talcahuano on the Bay of Concepcion, but the wind started to roar in the rigging. Without a chart, Cowell was unable to find a safe passage along the lee shore, so the Essex hauled off seaward under double-reefed topsails, and soon the crew had to take in more canvas to keep from losing the main topmast.
“Pitching very deep, and straining considerably,” the frigate flew before the storm all night, and by morning she had passed well north of the Bay of Concepcion. Having overshot it, Porter decided to get provisions farther on at Valparaiso—a fateful difference, for ten American whalers were awaiting a savior at Talcahuano. The captain of the Essex was unaware of this splendid chance to be a hero. The unarmed whaleships were laden with oil, millions of dollars’ worth, with which to light the streets and buildings of wartime America; without a convoy, their Quaker pacifist captains and crews stood little chance of getting past the British blockade in the Atlantic and arriving safely home.
Sailing onward through a dungeon bank of fog, Porter stood on the quarterdeck, fantasizing. War bringer and admiral of the South Sea, he could not be stopped. He would wipe out the enemy’s commerce, capture their oil and men, and transform their vessels into his own fleet of warships. Ghosting northward in the obscurity somewhere close to the Bay of Valparaiso, the men of the Essex suddenly realized that they were not alone; the quiet sea came to life, exhaling the breath of its depths as a great shoal of sperm whales plunged and surged along by the invisible hundreds. In a sea full of whales, where were the whaleships? Perhaps they were out there, killing—busy British whalers, full of oil. He would, he thought, become as wealthy as Lord Anson; and he would return to New York at the head of a flotilla that would make him a legend.
It was this secret and self-assigned mission, this fantasy of wealth and glory, that carried the renegade Porter into Valparaiso.
*See, for example, the 1803 voyage of American merchants Richard J. Cleveland and William Shaler, up the western coast of South America and on to California, smuggling goods and distributing copies of the U. S. Constitution.
*They had probably become sick with the change of diet from salt junk (preserved beef) to one with added fresh fruits and vegetables.
Chapter Five
Revolution in Chile
After receiving President Madison’s appointment as consul general to Southern Spanish American Republics, Roberts Poinsett set out in November 1811 to cross the pampas and the high passes of the Andes on his way to Chile. Descending from the mountains into the lush summer abundance of the Aconcagua Valley, he thought he had arrived in another world. Riding into the capital city of Santiago, he was greeted by the inhabitants as if he were the answer to their prayers—an avatar of independence descending via the Andes from los Estados Unidos, the nearly legendary republic of America.
Poinsett was surprised by everything he saw: the European chara
cter of the center city, its beautiful river setting, the marching troops, the fervor of the people, and the popularity of the head of the revolutionary state, José Miguel Carrera. And Poinsett was surprised to find himself without rivals; apart from a scattering of business agents and merchants, London was unrepresented in the capital.
He knew that his mission in Chile would be very different from that in Buenos Aires. This world on the far side of the Andes was walled off and subject to its own cultural and political influences. As he studied the complex and potentially explosive situation of a country in revolt and verging on warfare, Poinsett, the visionary individualist, came to see his own image reflected in the charismatic Carrera, twenty-six, the undisputed leader of the revolutionary junto.
Part of Carrera’s singularity, Poinsett realized, was his distance from the other revolutionaries and their infighting. Like Poinsett himself, he had spent most of his young manhood abroad in Europe, growing up in the Spanish army. Far from the quiet of his home colony, he had engaged in the business of warfare and had risen through the ranks to cavalry major, and he had witnessed the fall of the inept Bourbon kings and the rise of the strong Spanish republican faction for which he had fought against Napoleon. Returning to Chile in July 1811, the idealistic Carrera “had no knowledge of my country, as I was a newcomer.” Immediately he had been enlisted in a conspiracy, along with his brothers Luis (Lucho) and Juan José, militia captains, to overthrow the government of “inept men” who were “enemies of the cause.” The chief conspirators had been the fomenters of the original uprising in June 1810, the leaders of the powerful Larrain family of Santiago, who, inspired by events in Buenos Aires, had made a grab for power primarily to place their own people in offices that had been held for centuries by Spanish bureaucrats.