by Robert Booth
Captain Tucker opened fire. The Cherub was quite close to the target and had many long guns and a few carronades. The Essex had a few long guns bow and stern, and most of the carronades uselessly pointing in the wrong directions. Porter’s constant drilling now paid off, and the forward gun crews, with only four cannon, dealt out such punishment that Cherub soon moved away with Captain Tucker wounded.
Phoebe began her barrage to little effect, as many of her shots went wide and some flew completely over the Essex. Again the Yankee gun crews fired with fatal efficiency. A few carronades found their marks, putting seven thirty-two-pound balls through Phoebe’s hull along the waterline, while a twelve-pounder holed her under water and another lodged squarely in her mainmast. Porter prowled the deck, cheering on his busy men. He sent a boat’s crew to set a spring line on the anchor cable in order to swing the Essex into position for broadsides, but the spring line was shot away, and so was a second one. The stationary Essex took a pounding, even as her gun crews and marines kept firing. On board the Phoebe, Lieutenant Ingram, the handsome idealist of war, had reconciled himself to the spectacle of a one-sided artillery drill and was coolly issuing commands when a cannon shot smashed the bulwarks and a log-sized piece of railing flew up and took off the top of his head.
At Porter’s side, twelve-year-old Midshipman Gatty Farragut would play many roles in a fight that, for him, began with “the horrid impression” made by “the death of the first man: it was a boatswain’s mate; his abdomen was taken entirely out, and he expired in a few moments.” After this man’s ghastly end, the boy’s overall experience of bombardment took on a different cast. The crewmen “soon fell so fast around me that it all appeared like a dream, and produced no effect on my nerves.” As Farragut stood next to Porter “just abaft the mainmast, a shot came through the waterways which glanced upwards, killing four men who stood by the side of their gun, taking the last man in the head, and his brains flew over us both, but it made no such impression on me as the death of the first man. I neither thought of nor noticed anything but the working of the guns.” In this way, watching the men at the cannons, fetching and placing the powder, Midshipman Farragut was able to withstand visions of devastation and carnage that might otherwise have undone him.
For all the heroism on board, there was great frustration as the marines’ musketry fell short and many guns remained silent, incapable of being aimed at Phoebe. But some did great damage, and the well-drilled cannoneers, supervised by Samuel Johnston at the long guns, fired truly, smashing the British decks and slashing the rigging so badly that after half an hour Hillyar felt that “appearances were a little inauspicious” and gave the order to make sail to get out of range. Then the cove fell silent except for the cries of the gulls and the wounded and the murmuring of the crowds that had gathered on the hillsides.
The men of the Essex had fought the enemy to a standstill. Although pinned near the shore, Porter’s frigate remained intact and afloat, and most of his crewmen were eager for more. After weeks of insults and slogans, of fistfights on land and false alarms at anchor and at sea, they had reached a fever pitch in battle, stoked by the buckets of rum laid out for them. His men, Porter knew, would fight to the end—but what might that look like? Unable to use deception or outside assistance—the Chileans in the forts had failed him—Porter still had choices. He could certainly surrender now, having put up an honorable resistance in an indefensible position. He could order his men to abandon ship and set her on fire. He could stay at anchor and fight against a vastly superior foe, sacrificing many more lives in addition to the twenty or more of his brave men who had already been killed or badly injured. Because he was David Porter, he could also imagine getting the Essex under way and shooting down the masts of both opponents, or pulling alongside the Phoebe and taking her by storm.
The British warships came to anchor beyond the reach of their target’s carronades but well within range of their own long guns. Then they resumed firing, and the Essex began to disintegrate. For the men on board, the missiles of death came randomly, in various shapes, out of the air or from the gut-level explosion of their own cannons. At one gun station, three separate crews—fifteen men—were successively wiped out while the same gun captain survived with only scratches. As Farragut described it, there was a surreal aspect to the experience of warfare on an unsailing ship. The sailors’ and marines’ combat training could not be fully applied to this encounter, in which they did none of the tasks of maneuvering under sail but became the occupants of an indefensible wooden fort. They never saw their opponents, let alone fought them. It all turned abstract early on, as missiles landed and blew things up, and men and material went flying. The main killers were the massive splinters of wooden railings and deck planks—the stuff of the men’s own vessel.
Such a splinter killed Lieutenant James Wilmer while he was trying to release the sheet anchor. Farragut witnessed his end, but Wilmer’s aide, young Henry Ruff, did not. When Ruff asked Farragut if he had seen his lieutenant, Gatty said that he feared the lieutenant had been killed, whereupon Ruff thought for a moment and declared, “Well, if he is gone, I will go too,” and jumped out a gunport to his death. In another instance, Farragut and an old quartermaster, Francis Bland, were standing near the ship’s wheel when the boy saw a flying cannonball “coming over the fore yard in such a direction as I thought would hit him or me, so I told him to jump and pulled him towards me at the same instant that the shot took off his right leg.”
Porter, with a spring line now on the cable, moved his vessel a bit, but not enough. He imagined an epic reversal. In his vision Phoebe was wounded and Essex was a predator. Joyfully, he gave the order to cut the cable and fall on the enemy, but the halyards for hoisting the sails were all cut and only a jib could be raised, not enough to take the ship far in the faltering breeze. Porter’s maneuver failed, and his men were being slaughtered. Still, the Phoebe had again retreated a bit, to find a more comfortable and safer position from which to rain down her bombs.
After months of sharing the neutral waters of Valparaiso Harbor, Porter and the frigate Essex, thirty-two guns, tried to break away from the British frigate Phoebe, thirty-six guns, and the sloop of war Cherub, eighteen guns. The Essex, a fast sailer, was headed for the open sea when her topmast collapsed. Porter moored her in a cove down the coast to make repairs, but the British attacked. Keeping their distance, they methodically poured hundreds of cannon shot into the helpless American vessel, whose captain’s refusal to surrender cost the lives of ninety of his men. That Porter should title this illustration “The Victory” suggests the depth of his delusions, the magnitude of his spin-doctoring, or both. (from Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, David Porter, 1815)
Death on board the Essex was totally random. Two men would be doing the same thing, and suddenly one’s head would blow off through no agency that could be observed. For most, their jobs became their battle; they focused on the repetitive tasks needed to keep firing the cannon toward vessels so far away and so enshrouded in smoke that it was impossible to know whether the shots were having any effect. Most were not; the carronades could not reach them, and their huge projectiles only tore up the waters of the cove. The men’s fight, now, was not for the United States. It was for their captain, who would not surrender; it was for their messmates; and it was for “free trade and sailors’ rights.” After all the singing and posturing of the weeks before, this was the phrase that the men would call out to encourage each other, and it also served as their last words, like prayers, to give meaning at the moment of death. They had all once been sailors in the merchant service and had seen their country’s commerce spread across the globe and carry its reputation to all nations. The men took great pride in that, and believed in their own cause—it was why they had enlisted in the navy. If they had to die fighting, it was good to do so under the banner of “Free Trade & Sailors Rights.”
Porter remained on deck, directing the action, “brave, cool, and intrepid
,” setting a suicidal example so that “every man appeared determined to sacrifice his life.” As they died horribly, in agony, with pieces of their bodies missing, the men called to Porter to keep fighting, as if there were some hope. Now, at the finale, the Essex could not stay where she was and he could not close with the Phoebe, so he would have to get the Essex ashore and destroy her. The ship was making progress toward the coast when the wind shifted and pushed her bow back toward the sea, so that she was again subjected to a horrific raking fire. One bow gunner, a young Scot, was hit full-on by a cannonball and had his whole leg shot off; calmly, he tied the stump with his handkerchief and then addressed his mates: “Well boys, I adopted the United States to fight for her, and I hope I have this day shown myself worthy the country of my adoption—I am no longer of any use to you or to her, and I will not be a burthen: So, goodbye!” He hiked himself onto the sill of the port, and went over.
Twice the men doused small fires on the Essex, and suddenly John Downes materialized, climbing aboard out of a boat from the Essex Junior to receive final orders from his captain. Porter had kept the smaller vessel out of the fight to give her a chance to survive and perhaps escape. The enemy continued to rake the Essex, which could not bring even one gun to bear. Most of her cannon had fallen silent through direct hits and the death and injury of the gun crews. Downes assisted in bringing the head of the Essex around, with hopes of setting her adrift on waters that had gone calm—but the hawser parted, and nothing more could be done. Through it all, the Phoebe and the Cherub poured heavy metal into the Essex with devastating results.
Farragut, like other midshipmen, ran errands during the fighting. At one point Porter gave him a pistol and ordered him to hunt down and shoot a man who had deserted his post—the boy did not find him. Later, coming up from the wardroom with priming tubes of gunpowder, Farragut was at the head of the ladder when “the captain of the gun directly opposite the hatch was struck full in the face by an 18-pound shot and fell back upon me”—the ultimate dead weight. “We both fell down the hatch together (and) I struck on my head, and fortunately he fell on my hips, whereas, as he was a man weighing about 200 pounds, had he fallen directly on my (upper) body he would have killed me. I lay there stunned for a few minutes by the blow; when, awakening, as it were, from a dream, I ran on deck. The Captain, seeing me covered with blood, asked me if I was wounded, to which I replied, ‘I believe not, sir.’ ‘Then, my son,’ said he, ‘where are the tubes?’”
Porter’s men kept firing, or trying, although it was hopeless and ghastly on board the Essex, a red cavern of pure carnage in which men exploded and limbs and heads rolled around on the blood-slick decks. The remaining officers, gallant to the last, now fell, and only Johnston, McKnight, and John Glover Cowell continued at their posts. In his spotless lieutenant’s uniform, Cowell dodged around the deck, encouraging the men at their guns, moving from place to place to direct the crews and form new ones as the others were killed. He knew that two of his fellow Marbleheaders were dead, and two wounded, and he was determined to keep on.* After two hours in the thick of it, Cowell was hit and sent flying backward across the deck. When he came to, his right leg was wrecked. His men bore him down to the surgery in the cockpit, but he saw how busy the doctors were. Doctor Hoffman came over to confer, and after a heated discussion the surgeon applied a tourniquet to Cowell’s thigh, and the lieutenant hobbled up the ladder and back to his station, greeting his men with a grimacing smile and saying that together they would see the fight through to the end.
Once again the ship caught fire as a stack of cartridges exploded in the main hatchway, and sailors came screaming up from below with their clothes ablaze. Their friends tried to strip them, and when they could not they yelled at the burning men: “Jump overboard! Jump overboard!” Above the din of bombardment, the cry spread through the ship like a command, and the crew thought the Essex must be about to explode. Although they were more than half a mile from shore and many of them could not swim, dozens of sailors and marines abandoned their posts and jumped into the water.
Porter could do nothing to stop or assist them, and he would not leave the Essex. When he called for his officers, he was stunned to find that only Decatur McKnight answered the summons; the rest were dead, wounded, or swimming toward shore. In despair and defiance, Porter ordered that they torch the ship, but McKnight made a plea for the “brave companions lying wounded below.” Porter thought again; the men should not be roasted, and the Essex might already be so badly damaged as to render her useless to the enemy. He took back his order and issued a new one: Lower the ensign. Even then, after sending the message of surrender, there was no relief. Amid the smoke and wreckage, the signal was evidently missed by the British. Although the Essex had ceased firing, the gunners of the Cherub and the Phoebe kept at their work, and more Americans were killed and wounded. Captain Porter stood at the mainmast, furious, half-mad, spattered with blood and brains, waving his sword and screaming into the maw of a war that did not hear him.
In the belief that Hillyar intended to kill them all, Porter ordered that the ensign be raised again so that they could go down fighting under the flag, but no sooner had he spoken than the deathly booming ended and the echoes died away. The thick smoke drifted off on the light southerly breeze, revealing the scene to the spectators on the hills. It was half past six and the beginning of another mild evening in the Valley of Paradise.
Of Porter’s crew of 255, about 90 had died and an equal number were wounded—the worst slaughter in the history of the navy. The dead were silent, blown suddenly to smithereens or expiring below in the screaming cockpit as the blood-soaked surgeons kept slicing and gouging, amputating limbs that had been mangled and shredded, knowing that most had no chance. When the first British party came on board, they found twenty-three corpses on the spar deck alone. To one side, forty-four severed limbs were stacked in a pile. Not all of the dead died on board. A fair number had jumped overboard and drowned, although some made it to the beaches only to be shot down in the sand.
The living were the undead. The battle was over, and they, for no apparent reason, had not been killed. As wanderers in the chaos of destruction, they had emerged conscious and alive when so many others had not. The sights they had seen they would never forget; nothing like this would ever happen to any of them again. It had been an apocalypse, without hope of survival, and many of them were quite drunk, having made ample use of the buckets of rum. A few were so affected by the experience of extremity and so incredulous that they had survived that they decided a mistake had been made. Benjamin Hazen, a young sailor from a farm in rural Massachusetts, went below after the firing ceased. He washed his face and returned in a clean suit as if headed to Sunday meeting. “I don’t know about you,” he announced, “but I will never, ever, be made a prisoner of the damnable English,” and he started trotting and then hopped the rail into the Pacific.
Gatty Farragut, like the rest of the survivors, had to deal with the aftermath. “The effect of excitement is astonishing,” he found. “Accustomed to blood and death” early in the fight, he was amazed at the sudden change in his feelings, the rush of painful intensity, that occurred in the aftermath when he went below into the dark world of suffering and horror, full of “the mangled bodies of my shipmates, dead and dying, groaning, cursing, and expiring with the most patriotic sentiments on their lips. I became faint and sickened; my sympathies were all excited.”
As the doctors went about their gruesome work, the boy “assisted to staunch the blood and dress the wounded as occasion required.” In the carnage of the cockpit surgery, men cried out for water and writhed in agony, pressing and tearing at their wounds, knocking back liquor, waiting to go under the knife. One of Farragut’s best friends, Lieutenant Cowell, sat quietly, face pale and eyes bright. Farragut was pleased and excited to find him, and asked how he fared. Cowell’s shocking reply was, “Oh Gatty, I fear it is all up with me.” The boy hastened to Doctor Hoffman, who, “with some ass
istance, laid him on the table, and found that his leg was shattered above the knee.” The midshipman was taken aside and told that his friend might easily have saved his own life an hour before, during the battle. When Cowell had been brought below, the doctor had “proposed to drop another patient to attend to him,” but Lieutenant Cowell had refused to pull rank, replying, “No, no, doctor—none of that—fair play is the jewel. One man’s life is as dear as another’s, and I would not cheat any poor fellow out of his turn.”
Cowell was made of stern stuff. He survived the belated amputation and was taken ashore to recover. Many others joined him, and they were treated with the greatest care and kindness by the people of the town.
Porter was bereft when he went on board the Phoebe. The dream of glory was gone. His hopes for “something more splendid” had resulted in the loss of his ship and the slaughter of his men. He tendered his sword to his old friend Hillyar, who praised Porter for his bravery and assured him of liberal terms. The two captains soon got down to the business of surrender and possession, of prisoners and lodgings and transportation. Porter, subdued and perhaps shocked by defeat, did not at that time protest the legitimacy of the battle or raise the subject of neutral waters. Instead he quibbled about the outline of Hillyar’s preliminary report and worked himself into a fury over precise sequences of events and minutes elapsed, insisting on his version as if it were still possible to achieve a victory.
There was no such discussion among the crewmen, exhausted survivors of a two-and-a-half-hour lifetime of horrifying mayhem. The victors felt relief and some elation, but it had not really been a fair fight, and some of their friends were dead because of it: a marine, three sailors, and the esteemed Chief Officer Ingram. Below decks, Phoebe’s doctors had worked skillfully to save the lives of the seven wounded.