by Robert Booth
Only David Porter could believe that such a force could withstand the concentrated power of bomb ships, rocket ships, gunboats, and four battleships with a total of sixty guns to a side. He did not have long to wait for the test. Captain Gordon’s squadron left Alexandria on September 3, headed downriver on the fifty-mile trip to the bay. It was slow going, as before, with several groundings. Commodore Rodgers sent some barges and fire ships against the flotilla, but all were parried without damage. On the morning of the fifth, Gordon’s vessels came under fire from both sides of the Potomac. Oliver Hazard Perry’s battery at Indian Head was of “too small caliber to make much impression on the enemy,” so he withdrew. Off White House Point, Gordon anchored his frigates so the gun crews could perfect their aim, and they blasted away at Porter’s earthworks with calm, lethal efficiency, assisted by the bomb ships. Porter called for the militia to advance to “the woods upon the heights” and lay down musket fire, but the Virginians’ commander held back, realizing that he would be sacrificing men who could not stop the enemy from passing down the river.
Porter alone stayed at his post with a hundred men, including several veterans of the Essex, to face “the vast quantities of shot, shell, and rockets which were showered upon the hills.” His battery had no effect on the ships below, while the gunnery of the British squadron made a Rancagua of the cliff top, a chaos of explosions, shrapnel, and slaughter. As before, Porter stood unscathed, but Lieutenant Barnewall received his third wound and Doctor Hoffman was bleeding at the head. Noticing that thirty men lay dead or wounded in the killing pit, Porter ordered the discharge of a few more pointless shots, his last in this war, and then sounded a retreat to a hill nearby, entreating the survivors to be ready to “charge the enemy if he should land to spike our guns.” It was a final fantasy, and by eight o’clock, those guns were silent.
Slowly, the ships and brigs and schooners and sloops of the convoy passed down the peaceful river. It was a sight never seen before: a few British warships leading twenty-one proud trading vessels, safe from every army and every navy in the world, in a majestic parade toward the bay and the horizon beyond, where Britannia ruled the waves from the Americas to Europe and Africa, from Arabia and India to the far reaches of the Orient, and on into the vast Pacific.
The British army that had captured Washington next began to advance on Baltimore, accompanied by a flotilla in the Chesapeake Bay. David Porter could not get through enemy lines, but his hometown had no need of him anyway. Samuel Smith and the militia defeated the British regulars at the Battle of North Point. On September 14, the British withdrew, just as they did in New York State, where MacDonough’s naval victory at Lake Champlain caused General Prevost to retreat to Canada.*
For Porter, the war remained an opportunity for career advancement. War was his business, without which things would be slow and boring. Porter’s new frigate had gone up in smoke, and the other battleships were blockaded in port. Still, he was inspired by the success of the Baltimore privateers, and he proposed the formation of a fleet of fast navy vessels to raid Britain’s commerce in the Caribbean. To his surprise, Secretary Jones authorized it, and Porter got to work.
Madison addressed Congress on the state of the union on September 20. He had not approved or even recognized Porter’s embarrassing annexation of a Pacific island, but Porter was popular, and Madison was his president. At last, things were going well for the United States in its war effort, so in his speech Madison could afford to note a couple of disappointments. After acknowledging the capture of the frigate Chesapeake and the heroic death of Captain James Lawrence, he stated that “on the ocean, the pride of our naval arms has been amply supported. A second frigate has fallen into the hands of the enemy: but the loss is hidden in the blaze of heroism with which she was defended. Captain Porter, who commanded her, and whose previous career had been distinguished by daring enterprise, and by fertility of genius, maintained a sanguinary contest against two ships, one of them superior to his own, and other severe disadvantages; till humanity tore down the colors which valor had nailed to the mast. This officer and his comrades have added much to the rising glory of the American flag; and have merited all the effusions of gratitude which their country is ever ready to bestow on the champions of its rights and of its safety.”
Porter’s stock stayed high. His friend Washington Irving, famous author, excerpted Nukuhivan passages from Porter’s journal in his Analectic Magazine for October and November 1814, advising that “those who have hitherto admired Captain Porter only as the hero of Valparaiso, will doubtless be pleased to see our American Anson in another character: like [Captain] Cook, observing and describing the manners and habits of newly discovered savages.”
The Federalists of suave old Salem, builders of the Essex, responded with outrage at Porter and his actions. The editor of the Salem Gazette flogged him for committing mass murder and traducing “the character and honor of this country.” In conclusion, the editor quoted Porter’s own shameless description of the Taipi valley as he was leaving it: “When I had reached the summit of the mountain, I stopped to contemplate that valley which in the morning we had viewed in all its beauty, the scene of abundance and happiness. A long line of smoking ruins now marked our traces from one end to the other: the opposite hills were covered with the unhappy fugitives, and the whole presented a scene of devastation and horror.” The editor closed abruptly with “Reader! Are you an American? Then, here stop and cover your face!”
In Albany, a well-informed reader using the penname “Las Casas”* reacted incredulously to Irving’s Anson-Cook apotheosis of Porter. It was not Porter’s candor that bothered him, but the ruthless brutality, the “hostile aggression” toward “defenseless natives (for they knew not the use of fire arms),” as if Porter had been eager to “slaughter” these people. Las Casas felt shame for America when he contrasted Porter’s “prompt interference in the quarrels of these petty tribes” with the behavior of others—Cook, Vancouver, Pelouse—in these same remote waters where cross-cultural encounters tested the values of both parties. Brilliantly, Las Casas went on to relate Porter’s adventures to the condition of the United States, which, two years into the war, now found its ports blockaded, its countryside overrun by British armies, its borders invaded by counterattacking Canadians, and its national capital smoldering in ruins. In a way, America had brought on the devastation that the Taipi had never asked for, the Taipi in whom, as he read Porter’s narrative, Las Casas saw virtues that were scarce in America: “On reading the fate of these noble barbarians, or rather of these exalted patriots, what person will not admire their heroism and lament their fall with mingled emotions of astonishment, grief, and indignation?” In one day of extreme violence, Porter had arguably created “a dread and horror of civilized Americans throughout all Polynesia,” and subjected American mariners to years of reprisals.
Las Casas saw all this and deplored the coarseness that war had unleashed in his formerly rational and polite republic. As war tainted everything, and as the nation’s president, burned out of his house, acted and spoke out of fear of a general collapse and total defeat, it was easy to extol the warlord, praising the results and ignoring the means, whether in the Pacific or at home. In closing, Las Casas offered little hope. Andrew Jackson, Indian slaughterer, and David Porter, Polynesian killer, were made heroes in the public prints, and President Madison could only praise them “with no emotion of concern for our own barbarities.” Las Casas asked, “And shall such tragedies pass before us unminded as the idle wind? On hearing of these things, the man of serious and devout meditation”—the old-school American trying to live in peace and justice with his neighbor—“will be apt to start, and inquire anxiously, What has become of the moral sense of this country?”
Desperate to get into battle before the war ended, Porter spent weeks and then months on the logistics for the new naval force for the Caribbean, and finally had to admit that he could not bring together enough ships and supplies and men t
o make it happen. Instead, he predictably proposed a cruise to the Pacific. Secretary Jones approved, putting him in charge of a three-vessel squadron, but his last chance to outdo Anson was thwarted when his friend Captain Stephen Decatur refused to serve under him.
Getting home was no easy thing for Consul General Poinsett. While stuck at the Argentine capital from June 1814 onward, he continued to compose messages to Secretary Monroe, just as he had done all along, without any response. Unaware of the victory of Osorio and the exile of the Carreras and the rest of the patriots, Poinsett summarized “the present state of Buenos Ayres and Chile in order to enable you to judge of the probable result of the revolution of these colonies.” Regarding Argentina and its main city Buenos Aires, he described the supreme director, Posadas, as well advised, intent on vesting all of the region’s power in the capital, and determined to fend off Spain, primarily by means of a close alliance with England. “In the prosecution of their plans to free themselves from the yoke of Spain, they endeavour by every possible means to interest Great Britain in their favour, and, in order to accomplish, as far as concerns them, the guarantee given by that power of the integrity of the Spanish monarchy, have determined to send deputies to Spain and proffer their allegiance, but at the same time to insist on a free commerce, and election of their own rulers, and to be allowed to keep on foot a small standing force—conditions which secure their future freedom and the enjoyment of their rights.” Poinsett believed that their trade with Britain was “the principal resource of Buenos Aires,” producing “great advantages from expanding their commercial spirit” to the benefit of London and the detriment of “the jealous colonial policy of Spain.” As he would note later in this report, the leadership’s preference for Britain was not at all shared by the people in general, who favored the United States as friend and ally.
The Buenos Aires leaders, whose armies were led by San Martin, were vigorously opposed by José Gervasio Artigas, chief of the Banda Oriental (much of modern Uruguay), who was also committed to an independent federal union and backed by many of those from the interior who felt that the capital had too much power and was too ready to make deals with the royalists at Montevideo and Rio. In this, the Artigas party resembled Paraguay, which, with two presidents and a large congress, was determined to preserve “itself free from the influence of Buenos Aires.” Both parties in Argentina, observed Poinsett, “affect great reverence for the constitution and government of the United States,” and people generally felt very positive “toward their brethren of the north; and it is certain that, whatever may be the disposition of the raging factions, the popular sentiment is so strong against the English that they will never gain a permanent footing in these countries.”
Regarding Chile, Poinsett had less to say, perhaps because of the trauma of the events that had led to his banishment. With an analytical distance that disguised his own deep involvement and partisan behavior in the highest levels of the revolution, he identified Chile’s greatest problem as the prevalence of “violent and irreconcilable factions, as at present the Carreras and Larrains—the former, active and daring, influenced with the love of glory and anxious to advance the welfare of the country—the latter, equally ambitious but more timid, have, by intrigue and cunning means, taken possession of the command, and have been again immediately dispossessed by their more enterprising adversaries, who now govern the kingdom already so weakened by their dissensions that it will probably fall into the hands of the royalists.”
Poinsett had lost his idealism and could no longer see any clear prospect of independence in South America, concluding that “it is difficult to form a correct opinion what may be the result of the revolution. It has hitherto been marked by rapid and continual changes of rulers and measures, than which nothing can be more destructive to the progress of a state, and denotes a character that would bear them through a revolution only under the most favorable circumstances. If, however, at the presence of imminent danger, all parties unite in the common defense, the power of Spain will not be sufficient to subdue them unless she purchases subsidies and assistance from Great Britain by yielding her commercial privileges in the colonies, which, from the present temper of the Court of Madrid, does not seem probable.
“Should they struggle through all their difficulties and succeed in establishing their independence, it is much to be feared that, harassed at the frequent failures of their legislative experiments, and having found that all parties—as they alternately fill the seat of government in order to secure their power—trample on the sacred rights of liberty, they will despair of obtaining that inestimable blessing, and terminate the struggle by a military despotism.”
Like Consul Poinsett, John Gamble, the marine lieutenant, had begun to wonder if he would ever get home to America. In October 1814, at Valparaiso, he was put on board the Cherub, bound for Brazil with two prizes, one of them Gamble’s own former command, Sir Andrew Hammond. Limping onto the wharf in Rio on November 30, Gamble was permitted “to lodge in town”—the other Cherub prisoners were required to stay on board—and “he had the pleasure to meet with several American gentlemen, not a few of them, like himself, extremely desirous to go home.” Gamble met with Thomas Sumter, still the minister in this Portuguese port, who was trying to charter a cartel for the sixty American prisoners there. Gamble’s friend Benjamin Clapp soon came ashore, and they did some horseback touring while Sumter negotiated for a transport. The deal was done, the passage was granted, but on February 8 Dixon, the British admiral, reneged.
Two weeks later a brig from England brought news of the peace treaty. Gamble was too sick to sail at first, having relapsed in the dust and sweltering heat. Impatient at the non-appearance of American ships, Gamble booked passage on the Swedish ship Good Hope, which cleared for France on May 15, more than five months after his arrival. She was “deeply laden, and withal, a dull sailer” whose “general progress through the water varied from two to four knots.” One night those on board were treated to a natural spectacle when “the surface of the water had a grand and brilliant appearance, and the wake of the ship, as far as the eye could see, seemed like one vast sheet of fire.” At the end of July, approaching the coast of France, the Good Hope fell in with an American vessel. “I left the Swede and went on board of this ship,” the Oliver Ellsworth, bound to New York, wrote Gamble. He was treated kindly, and on August 27, “after encountering a dreadful gale,” he had “the inexpressible joy to come once more within view of his native land, after an absence of two years and ten months.”
Gamble’s former Essex shipmates Lieutenant Stephen Decatur McKnight, eighteen, and acting Midshipman James R. Lyman, formerly of the ill-fated Colt, had also hitched a ride from Rio with a Swede, Captain Jan Gabriel Mollen, and were well along on a voyage to England when overtaken by a strange vessel from which a warning shot was fired. She flew an English ensign, and the boarding officer wore an English surgeon’s uniform. After some shuffling of papers, it was revealed that this was the U.S. sloop of war Wasp, with 150 men and twenty-two guns, under Captain Johnston Blakeley.
The Wasp had been busy. On the evening of September 1, she had fallen in with the eighteen-gun Royal Navy brig of war Avon and defeated her in a battle of broadsides. Moving on, Blakeley and crew had captured two merchant vessels, which they had scuttled, and on September 21 they had cut off a valuable Royal Navy eight-gun brig, Atalanta, and sent her for the United States. Then came the mid-ocean interception of the Swedish vessel and the happiness of McKnight and Lyman in transferring to a ship of the U.S. Navy, one that had, in four months of cruising, won three victories over the Royal Navy and destroyed nine merchant vessels. The two young men had a chance to reflect on Johnston Blakeley’s record. Without leaving the Atlantic, the Wasp, sometimes cruising right up the English Channel, had done more damage to enemy shipping and morale in the month of September alone than anything even attempted by Porter and the Essex in more than a year in the Pacific.
Captain Mollen and crew bad
e them all farewell as the handsome warship stood for the equator, hoping to overtake a British convoy bound for the West Indies in hurricane season.
The Wasp and her gallant men were never seen again.
Poinsett waited a while longer for a ship to carry him homeward, but the British were unwilling. As long as there was a war on, they wanted him on the sidelines, under observation. One night in November he arranged for an open boat to carry him down the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo, where he was able to get a berth on a Portuguese brig. Transferring to a schooner at the Brazilian port of Bahia, he found himself headed for the coast of North Africa and the island of Madeira, 400 miles out to sea, where he learned that the war was over. He spent some weeks at Funchal, observing and making a report on yet another foreign culture. At last he booked passage for the United States, and at the end of May 1815, he arrived in Charleston, too late to become a hero.
Poinsett had not meant to go to South America. When he had returned from Europe in 1810, he had hoped for fame and glory fighting the battles of his country. Instead he had taken the assignment that the president had offered, giving up a large part of his life and risking his career to represent the United States among revolutionary movements in Spanish America. It was a dangerous and solitary mission, one that had taught him a great deal about the power of culture to influence the political development of a people, and a great deal also about how much any one man could accomplish.