by Robert Booth
Porter offered the shipless Yankee mariners the choice of joining the crew of the Essex or going ashore. Nine went with Porter. In his continuing state of ignorance, he urged Captains Gardner and West to take their vessels into Peruvian ports—a sure way to lose them again—and he thought about hunting down the Nimrod, which was likely chasing the Barclay and her captors. Since he could not launch his campaign against British whalers until he was sure that the Royal Navy battleship Standard had gone beyond the Galápagos, he decided to pursue the Nimrod provided it did not “interfere too much with my other views”—the vision of a conquered fleet of twenty well-filled whaleships worth millions.
And there was another consideration, one that had been a long time coming: Porter, for the first time, realized that his intended capture of the British whaling fleet would also protect unarmed American whaleships, whose masters may not have known about the Anglo-American war or about the presence of Peruvian and English sea wolves. Porter told himself that “if I should only succeed in driving the British from that ocean, and leaving it free for our own vessels, I conceive that I shall have rendered an essential service to my country”—at the same time reaping untold wealth and giving him cover with his navy superiors. As he contemplated his pursuit of the Nimrod and perhaps the Seringapatam, he reminded himself, in his journal, to re-frame his renegade adventure as a rescue of the Pacific fleet of American whalers. That noble aim “would be considered a justification for departing from the letter of my instructions” and might earn him forgiveness for having gone rogue.
On March 28, Porter had his crew swarming to disguise the Essex with a false deck and a new paint job that concealed most of her guns. A few days later, this ersatz Spanish merchantman began chasing three vessels standing in for Callao. The lead ship, the American-flagged Barclay, soon struck, but suddenly all were becalmed, so Porter sent out his boats to tow the prize against the incoming tide. In full view of the shipping and defenders of the harbor, Porter himself ran up the English flag on the Essex. At Callao, the colors of every vessel were hastily raised too, in honor of the unexpected English battleship: all were Spanish except for one Briton, not the Nimrod. From the deck of the Essex, the master of the recaptured Barclay, Gideon Randall, a recent prisoner on the Nereyda, looked on, hoping to resume his command; however, his men preferred the Essex and would not return to the whaler. Randall therefore sailed with only three Americans, all of them sick with scurvy contracted after seven months at sea. Randall could not risk putting into a Peruvian port since Porter had trashed the Barclay’s captor, the Nereyda, and he could not pursue sperm whales without a crew. Porter solved the problem by offering “to put on board hands enough to work his vessel,” and Randall promised to guide him to the Galápagos haunts of the British whalers. Midshipman John S. Cowan and eight men now joined the skeleton crew under Captain Randall. Together, the Essex and the Barclay stood off to the north to touch at Paita, thence to the killing grounds.
Porter now had some idea what he was looking for. Before leaving him, Captains Worth and West had supplied a list of all whaleships in the Pacific, with details about the twenty English-flagged vessels, each about 400 tons burthen. There were twenty-three American vessels, two from New Bedford and the rest from Nantucket. They reported that a large part of the American whaling fleet had already sailed south, seeking safety in the Creole ports of lower Chile. Typical was the President of Nantucket, commanded by Solomon Folger. Gamming with the Nantucket whaler Atlas, he had learned about the start of the Anglo-American war from Captain Obed Joy, who had it from the courteous Captain Obed Wyer of Nantucket, commanding the British-flagged armed whaler Atlantic. Thanks to the timely alert from Wyer, Joy and Folger had decided to head south to get a convoy to the United States. Putting in at Talcahuano, they came upon ten American whalers and crews also waiting for an escort. David Porter, unaware, had sailed right past them in early March; now, courtesy of Worth and West, Porter was fully aware of their desperate situation, and it was not too late for the Essex to help them.
Porter and the Essex approached Paita trailed by the Barclay. On the way, in the thick of an immense flock of birds, Porter noticed “small red specks” like blood clotting the sea, which he supposed to have come from “some hog killed on board”; looking closer, he saw that the specks had a “quick motion,” so he lowered a bucket and found them to be “young crawfish,” swimming randomly. “[T]hey did not appear to be governed by any general laws, each one pursuing his own course and shifting for himself.” Perhaps Porter recognized something familiar in their behavior.
The Essex was never free of problems, with more than 300 men on board. Not long before, the frigate’s supply of fresh water had turned brackish. Some were suffering from its effects, but none suffered more than James Spafford, the gunner’s mate, writhing in slow-dying agony. The poor man had been accidentally shot by near-sighted Lieutenant Stephen McKnight while they had foraged on Mocha Island three weeks before. Finally, on April 4, Spafford expired, and his body “was committed to the deep, according to the funeral ceremonies of the church.” With his passing, his friends were left to reflect on the unpredictability of life and death at sea, where a murderous storm might spare them all, but a man’s own officer might accidentally shoot him down—a bad omen indeed for the superstitious sailors of the Essex.
Porter sailed on through waters alive with seals and the turbulence of fish-chasing whales. And they were not alone: two small sailing vessels off Paita proved to be “rafts or catamarans, steering by the wind, each having six men to work them,” each consisting of eight long logs lashed together and carrying deck cargoes of cocoa, bound from Guayaquil to Guacho, a voyage of 600 miles and two months. The decks were strewn with fish bones and garbage, and Porter reflected that the ocean was indeed pacific if these “barbarous vessels” could make such a long trip in safety. The crude rafts offended him as a mariner, but fascinated him too; their shabbiness was a “convincing instance of the unenlightened state of the people of this part of the world.” The whole coasting trade of Peru, he decided, was clear evidence of a people so “behind-hand in civilization and intelligence with the rest of the world that the appearance of all the vessels built on the Spanish coast of the Pacific (except the few built at Guayaquil) bespeaks the extreme ignorance of the constructor as well as the navigator.”
Porter’s own ignorance was far more impressive. He had not cared much about the Chilenos and their revolution. He had not felt the tremors of a coast that was quaking with war; he had not seen that Americans were targets and that the few brave Americans fighting for an independent Chile might soon be held in a prison under a death sentence brought on by Porter’s own actions. Given the choice between chasing whaleships and fostering national independence under a leader who idolized the United States, he had chosen plunder. From the railing of his battleship, Porter called down questions to the lowly raftmen, who answered that no foreign vessels were to be found in the harbor of Paita. The great captain waved his thanks, and the frigate altered course, steering west-northwest away from South America. The rafts sailed on toward the undefended port of Valparaiso.
José Miguel Carrera and Joel Roberts Poinsett, generals of the army, appeared at Talca on April 5, 1813, with a small force but with the countryside mobilizing and some of the 9,000 provincial militiamen and their officers starting to arrive in camp. Within a few hours, Bernardo O’Higgins rode in from his adventures in the south. His news was not good. Viceroy Abascal’s commander, Pareja, had landed at the island of Chiloe with five vessels filled with arms, uniforms, and supplies, together with fifty Spanish officers who had taken command of the 1,500 Chilean militiamen at Chiloe and Valdivia.
O’Higgins had marched from his plantation toward Concepcion at the head of 100 soldiers whom he had personally trained and equipped. On the way, having learned of the fall of Concepcion, he had disbanded his men to avoid capture and had ridden on with a couple of friends to offer his services to Carrera. O’Higgins report
ed that Pareja’s army had doubled in size along the way as putative rebels had gone over to the royalists. It was the worst scenario for the prospects of a united Chilean state: the men of the south were evidently willing to serve in the armed forces of the royalists, and indeed to make up the bulk of their army. At Talcahuano they created a blockade against any rebel reinforcements or provisions that might arrive by sea. Lastra, at Valparaiso, was responsible for the Chilean nationalist navy, which had never been organized and which, in the absence of Porter and the Essex, had no battleship available to break through the royalist barriers.
South of the Maule River, 200 rebel militiamen were pinned down by the vanguard of Pareja’s army, which was camped at Linares. One night O’Higgins and a strike force galloped off into the darkness and went charging into the plaza at Linares, making prisoners of many of the surprised enemy cavalrymen. Sent over the Maule, the captives defected, and the militiamen marched north to join them in the rebel army. O’Higgins’ boldness and courage were inspiring to all. By April 18, the Chilean forces had large numbers, including Luis Carrera’s 200 artillerists with 400 mules and 16 small field pieces as well as 600 infantry, 1,500 cavalrymen, 200 national guardsmen, and assorted militia.
Carrera, advised by Poinsett, decided to create a salient south of the river, with earthworks and trenches blocking the enemy’s path to the Maule. Just then Juan Mackenna, who had been briefly detained by Carreristas at Santiago, came into camp to serve as quartermaster and to apply his considerable experience as a field engineer. Carrera had deployed his army in three blocs between Talca and the Maule, under him and his brothers, with Bernardo O’Higgins holding the salient to the south that Poinsett had chosen. When O’Higgins fell severely ill, his 600 men came under the command of militia colonel Juan Puga, a brave soldier assisted by Lieutenant Henry Ross, a military engineer from Baltimore.
Mackenna persuaded Carrera to abandon the forward salient, but before this order reached Puga and Ross, they led their men on a midnight raid against the enemy vanguard and encountered them at the village of Yerbas Buenas. Incredibly, they smashed into the headquarters camp of General Pareja himself, who awoke to blood-curdling cries of Muerto al Rey! Death to the King! Viva La Patria! Long live our country! Pareja fled naked on horseback, and some of his best officers were cut down with swords as they tried to escape. In the confusion, the royalist troops opened fire on each other as well as the rebels. The battle continued until daylight, when Puga retreated in good order with prisoners and spoils.
On his way back to the main corps, Puga’s command was cut off by a stray company of royalist cavalry. Pareja’s troops then overran Puga’s men and inflicted severe losses. Henry Ross was shot eight times in the thick of the fighting but still was able to escape. Puga’s retreat set off panic in the rebel army. When Carrera withdrew from the Maule to form a new line at Talca, Pareja ordered his army to attack, but his southern troops would not cross the Maule into the province of Santiago. Many of them realized that they had no interest in dying for the king.
Discovering that Pareja’s army was crumbling, Carrera and Poinsett sent their three divisions after the royalists, who retreated south toward Concepcion. April was the beginning of the rainy season, and Carrera lacked supplies and equipment. His men had fought well but could not be expected to pass the winter in the open. At a meeting of his top advisors, Mackenna favored an assault on Chillan, while Poinsett counseled bypassing Chillan and attacking the royalist garrisons at the key seaports of Concepcion and Talcahuano, where, he knew, the ten American whaleships had been captured by the royalists.
Carrera agreed with Poinsett. By taking the seaports, they would isolate Chillan in an otherwise all-rebel southern Concepcion province, and such a strategy was consistent with their plan of naval attack from the Pacific, which Carrera had arranged by authorizing the acquisition of two vessels at Valparaiso: the Colt, a mid-sized brig from New York, and the Pearl, a large former Boston ship used as a packet. Once properly armed and manned, they were to proceed to the Bay of Concepcion and blockade the royalists.
The vessels had been renamed La Perla and El Potrillo. The latter’s former first mate, Edward Barnewall, now served Chile in command of both vessels, and Samuel B. Johnston, printer of the Aurora, had accepted a first lieutenant’s commission as he “metamorphosed into a son of Neptune, going ‘to seek reputation, e’en in the cannon’s mouth.’” Barnewall and Johnston had taken on a nineteen-year-old Bostonian, Samuel Dusenbury, to help them hire a crew. They had enlisted only twenty-three Americans and so had hired another sixty-seven from a mix of Chileno and Spanish sailors and men from the visiting Portuguese Fama. Francisco Lastra, head of the Chilean navy and governor of Valparaiso, outfitted the vessels with munitions and cannon. The smaller Potrillo, under Captain Barnewall, mounted two swivel guns and twenty cannon, while La Perla had twenty-four guns and 150 men and sailed under a Chilean, José Vicente Barba, with a Yankee purser and pilot, John King, and the rest of the unruly crew drawn from Fama and the waterfront taverns.
Barnewall and Johnston were the toast of Valparaiso and frequent guests in the homes of the rich and beautiful. With the shocking departure of the Essex and Porter, these two and Barba comprised the entire officer corps of Chile’s navy. By April 26, Potrillo was ready to head south to Talcahuano to support the forces of Carrera and O’Higgins. It was taking longer for Captain Barba to outfit La Perla.
At Talcahuano, Solomon Folger of the President and his fellow American whaling captains—masters of ten unarmed, slow-moving vessels full of whale oil—had been waiting for assistance for two months. They had learned that an American battleship had arrived in the Pacific, presumably to give them a convoy into the Atlantic and a safe return home. But instead of Porter and the Essex, in late March two Peruvian warships arrived, and their 1,500 royalist troops took the port from the rebels after a brief battle. The royalists boarded the President and found a bag of gold in Captain Folger’s cabin, which gave them an excuse to arrest him for smuggling and to imprison him and all his men, to be carried off to Lima. The other American captains could not let that happen; one night they held a council of war and hatched a plan that would create such mayhem that they—or those who survived—might escape into the Pacific.
The desperate whaling captains knew nothing at all about the expedition of La Perla and Potrillo, due to sail from Valparaiso on Monday, May 3.
As Johnston described it, Captain Barnewall was hosting a dinner for “the American gentlemen then in Valparaiso” and some Chilean friends and the officers of La Perla when suddenly the cliffs of the port echoed with cannon fire, and the men rose from the table. The royalist warship Warren, “a privateer from Lima which for some time past had been cruising off the port, stood in and fired a gun as a challenge to us.” Barnewall received Governor Lastra’s permission to answer the challenge, and crowds of people came boiling up out of the city and onto the hills of the bay to see the naval action between the royalists and the patriots.
“The Pearl cut her cables and stood out,” wrote Lieutenant Johnston. “We weighed our anchor by hand, and, in about ten minutes after, stood out likewise. We made directly for the privateer, but were much alarmed on seeing that the Pearl stood from us with a crowd of sail,” almost as if she were trying to escape. “Not able to account for this strange maneuver (which was at first attributed to a wish of the Captain to get his men well to their stations, and at the same time amuse the enemy), we made all sail for him to speak him and know his intentions. As we passed the privateer [Warren] she commenced firing her bow guns at us, and continued it for upwards of an hour, to the number of 87 shot, without killing or wounding a man, and doing but very little damage to our sails or rigging.” It was all very odd.
Still, Barnewall kept coming, determined to get signals straight with Captain Barba and La Perla. As El Potrillo approached, La Perla fired at her with stern chasers. Barnewall thought this was part of a decoy, and he held course, gaining on his partner until
“within hail, and, on inquiring the cause of such strange proceedings,” he was answered by three broadsides of grapeshot accompanied by cheers for the king of Spain and the viceroy of Lima, “which were immediately answered by the Spanish and Portuguese part of our crew, in the same words.”
“Petrified with horror at these villainous proceedings on the part of the Pearl,” wrote Johnston, “and finding ourselves in a small brig with a large ship on each side of us, and our own crew in a state of mutiny, we determined to make sail, and endeavor to regain the port.” But that would not happen. For weeks Valparaiso had seethed with secret plots, and now, with the main topsail halyards cut, Barnewall and the other Yankees were overpowered until Johnston found himself alone on deck, calling for help and trying to steer the Potrillo toward the wharves. The crew yelled “To Lima! To Lima!” and he was surrounded by “soldiers [who] pointed their loaded muskets at my breast, and bid me surrender, if I wished to save my life.” He did so, and went below, leaving both vessels in control of the royalists, who sailed off to the northward, out to sea. The people on shore had no idea what they had just witnessed, but pilot John King, having jumped into the harbor from La Perla, swam to shore and finally gained the strength to tell the story of the betrayal and loss of Lastra’s Chilean navy.
The captive patriots were transported to Lima to be locked in a dungeon pending execution. The British members of the imprisoned crew were relieved of their fetters and confined in better quarters, while the Yanks were left to rot in the dark in reprisal for David Porter’s attack on Abascal’s Nereyda, flying the flag of Spain, a nation not at war with his own. It was only through the courageous and persistent intervention of an American merchant in Peru, Samuel Curson, in close contact with Poinsett, that his incarcerated countrymen would be spared the execution of their death sentences.