by Robert Booth
Importing nephews as his assistants, carrying on long-distance feuds with family members, and battling through heart attacks and various illnesses and prostrations in the early 1830s, Porter subsided into virtual retirement. His body, exhausted by years of stress and violence, had given out. Sometimes, for months, he could barely walk and could not talk at all. For the last two years of his life, he was an invalid. No one in the United States noticed. The business of the American ministry was done by dragomans and Porter relatives, and the opium kept moving out on American vessels, bound for China and Sumatra to create and sustain Asia’s addictions. Porter’s amazing signature, once as marvelous as a Marquesan tattoo, had collapsed into an illegible blotch.
After suffering terribly in his final months, Porter enjoyed five days of peace, lapsed into a coma, and died on March 3, 1843, at age sixty-three, having left five last wills and ten children in America, most of whom detested him. At his direction his body was to rest under Old Glory in a crypt at the foot of the embassy’s flagpole. “A deep grave was accordingly dug, which was lined and bricked, and a flooring of oak laid to prevent the effect of dampness.” His corpse was buried like a pharaoh, in a succession of sarcophagi: outside was a “strong lead coffin,” within which was a walnut casing marked with his initials, enclosing “an inner coffin of lead, made air tight and filled with rum.”
The secretary of the navy, believing that Porter “stood conspicuous among the distinguished men who have done honor to our country,” sent a brig of war to fetch the body of the man who had conquered Nukuhiva and lost his ship. On April 24, President Tyler, who happened to be planning a major annexation of his own—the part of Mexico called Texas—directed “that the flags be hoisted at half mast; that this order be read and thirteen minute guns be fired at each navy yard and naval station, and on board every vessel of war in the U.S. Navy, at noon, on the day after the receipt of this order; and that the officers of the navy and marine corps wear crepe on the left arm for the space of thirty days.”
Porter’s remains would be buried three more times and end up under a monument donated by the owners of a cemetery in Philadelphia. His legacy to the navy was most impressive, all things considered: his ward Gatty, David Glasgow Farragut—“damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”—and his son David Dixon Porter were indispensable leaders during the Civil War, and were, respectively, the first and second men ever to hold the rank of admiral of the U.S. Navy.
Torpoint
Word of Porter’s death was copied in some of the English papers and perhaps reached Torpoint, near Plymouth, as the spring flowers were blooming around the grounds of Tor House, home of retired Rear Admiral of the White, Sir James Hillyar, KCB.
After returning from Chile, Hillyar had supervised the refitting of the Phoebe and commanded her during peacetime until he was paid off at the end of forty-four years of service. He and his family went abroad to live, and returned from the Continent in 1830, when, at sixty-one, he took command of the Revenge. After a couple of years he was given the ship of the line Caledonia and ordered to the coast of Portugal, where he found a spot on the Tagus River to occupy for a quiet year. He was knighted in 1834 and again in 1840, and between those years was advanced to the rank of rear admiral, from which he was pensioned from the Royal Navy at a salary of 300 pounds.
In retirement Hillyar followed the news of Britain’s imperial activities around the globe and especially its ascendancy in Chile. After the Chileans’ defeat of a Peruvian-Bolivian force in 1839, Valparaiso became the largest seaport in the Pacific, running steamships along the coast and exporting huge quantities of wheat and copper all the way to China. With its own English newspaper and dozens of British merchant houses, Valparaiso had 5,000 Anglo residents and strong transoceanic relations with New Zealand and Australia. Well might Admiral Sir James Hillyar think that he had done his part to change the world.
On July 10, 1843, Hillyar died in his house by the sea in his seventy-fifth year, surrounded by friends and family. He had been thinking about his funeral and had had time to plan it out. There would be no delegation from London and no pomp or circumstance. His remains were interred at the local churchyard in a modest ceremony. The onlookers were the people and parishioners of Torpoint, and the mourners were the members of his family, including two sons who would themselves become admirals.
The pall containing the remains of their gallant captain was borne by four old warrant officers from the Phoebe who had served with him on that famous day, long since and a world away, when they had finally brought an end to the Pacific rampage of David Porter and the American frigate Essex.
*The Monroe Doctrine—which recognized existing European colonies while pledging U.S. intervention should European powers attempt to interfere with states in North and South America—was not promulgated until the end of 1823.
*Downes is believed to have amassed about $2 million while stationed on the South American coast, a very small part of which he would lend, from time to time, to the always-strapped David Porter.
*“Poinsett’s Tactics” were published in 1841 and remained the standard guide for cavalry procedures for years, including during the U.S. Civil War
†Downes, commanding a battleship in 1832, had attacked the bamboo village of Kuala Batu in Sumatra while carrying out what was to have been an inquiry into the circumstances of an episode of violence involving a Salem merchant vessel the year before. He killed more than 200 people and destroyed their town.
Selected Sources
The events of Captain David Porter’s improbable voyage into the Pacific world would probably never have been known except for the fact of Porter’s having kept a journal, remarkable for candor if not for honesty, which he published in 1815 as Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, when his adventures were fresh. I have used this version—he sanitized it in an 1822 edition—to inform my narrative and to try to understand a brave and baffling man. Porter’s Journal is a seminal work of American literature. It is the first American book about war published by a participant; the first account of American conquest of a foreign people; the first extended description of the Pacific by an American; and the first relation, in English, of the lifeways of the Marquesas Islanders. It is also the first scientific treatment of the Galápagos Islands, and it served as grist for some of Herman Melville’s best writing. Porter had hoped it would be a best seller, but it failed to reach a wide audience, and it caused a scandal for the rawness of the events it portrayed, unprecedented in the writing of American naval officers and even of all Americans.
Porter’s journal stands as an indictment of its author, not just for what he admits to having done and for what he failed to do, but for shutting us out of his interior life, the concerns of mind and heart that might have redeemed him. As published, the Journal is all exterior, full of surface action but empty of reflection or emotion: here, in hundreds of pages, he records no dreams or personal insights or instances of friendship; he betrays no yearning for home or thoughts of wife and children, and very little admiration for officers and men who loyally followed him across the seas and seasons. Porter admits to anxieties, but only those relating to nature’s harshness and the absence of the British prey that would justify his having gone rogue into the Pacific. God and man are of little interest: a deity is entirely absent, and the longest passage about a person is a rant directed at someone he had never met. When a favorite young lieutenant is killed in a duel, there is no mourning, and no punishment of the killer. In other cases, men who die on board ship are not buried but dumped into the sea in sight of land. Porter was no anthropologist—his observations of other peoples and cultures are singularly unenlightened—and he wholly lacked the methodical qualities of a first-rate explorer, but his acuity as a scientific observer was impressive, and it is a great irony that the book about his Pacific cruise proved to have its highest value, many years after it had been forgotten by the public, for an Englishman named Darwin.
Other sources for the ev
ents related in Mad for Glory follow.
Chapter 1
Chandler, Charles Lyon. “The Life of Joel Roberts Poinsett,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. LIX, No. 1. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1935, pp. 1–31.
Long, David F. Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1780–1843. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1970.
Paris, Francklyn Wynne. “The Three David Porters: Captain, Commodore, and Admiral, and Their Delaware Roots,” Delaware Genealogical Society Journal, vol. 1, Nos. 1–3. Wilmington: Delaware Genealogical Society, 1981–82.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Porter, David Dixon. Memoir of Commodore David Porter, of the United States Navy. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1875.
Shaler, William. “Journal of A Voyage Between China and The North-western Coast of America Made in 1804,” American Register, No. 3. Philadelphia, 1808, pp. 137–175.
Chapter 2
Gallatin, Albert. Letter to James Madison, August 15, 1810, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-02-02-0600 [last update: 2015-06-29]). Source: The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 2, 1 October 1809–2 November 1810, ed. J. C. A. Stagg, Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan Holbrook Perdue. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 486–488. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mjm.12_0554_0556
Jameson, J.F. “Correspondence of John C. Calhoun,” in Annual Report of American Historical Association, 1899, Volume II. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900.
Madison, James. Letter Albert Gallatin, August 22, 1810, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/03-02-02-0617 [last update: 2015-06-29]). Source: The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 2, 1 October 1809–2 November 1810, ed. J. C. A. Stagg, Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan Holbrook Perdue. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 500–502.
Monroe, James. Letter to Joel Roberts Poinsett, April 30, 1811. Quoted in Frederic L. Paxson, The Independence of the South American Republics, Second edition. Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1916, p. 113.
Chapter 3
Cowell, John Glover. Letter to U.S. Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton, September 24, 1812. Miscellaneous Letters received by Secretary of Navy. Washington, DC: Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, National Archives.
Feltus, William M. Diary entry, November 23, 1812, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Harris, Thomas. The Life and Services of Commodore William Bainbridge, USN. Philadelphia: Carey Lea & Blanchard, 1837.
Mahan, Alfred T. Admiral Farragut. New York: Appleton & Co., 1892.
McKee, Christopher. A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Porter, David Dixon. Memoir of Commodore David Porter, of the United States Navy. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1875.
Chapter 4
Cleveland, Richard J. A Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, Vol. I. Cambridge, Mass.: John Owen, 1842, pp. 165–225.
Long, David F. Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1780–1843. Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1970.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to The Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Reynolds, Jeremiah. “Mocha Dick, or the White Whale of the Pacific,” The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine. Vol. 13, No. 5, May 1839, New York: John Allen, pp. 377–392.
Chapter 5
Clissold, Stephen. Bernardo O’Higgins and the Independence of Chile. New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.
Collier, William M., and Cruz, Guillermo F. La Primera Mision de Los Estados Unidos de America en Chile, uso exclusivo de VITANET, Biblioteca Virtual ano 2004.
Felstiner, Mary L. “Kinship Politics in the Chilean Independence Movement,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 56.1, 1976.
Galdames, Luis. Estudio de Historia de Chile. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1906.
Johnston, Samuel Burr. Letters Written During a Residence of Three Years in Chili. Erie, Penn.: R. I. Curtis, 1816.
Poinsett, Joel Roberts. Letter to Secretary of State James Monroe, September 15, 1814. Poinsett Papers, Library of the Historical Museum of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Vilches, Patricia. “Not a Fox but a Lion: A Machiavellian Reading of Chile’s First President, José Miguel Carrera,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 123–144.
Chapter 6
Irarte, Tomas de. Biografia Del Brigarier General D. José Miguel Carrera. Privately printed, 1863.
Poinsett, Joel Roberts. Letter to Department of State, September 10, 1814, quoted by Parton, Dorothy M. The Diplomatic Career of Joel Roberts Poinsett. Doctoral dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1934.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Chapter 7
Feltus, William M. Diary entry, March 26, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, Washington DC, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Fitzgerald, Nathaniel, and “Justice.” “A Tribute” and “Poinsett and the Whalers,” Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror, September 7 and September 14, 1872; August 9, 1824.
Hoffman, Richard K. Letter to John M. Gamble, April 15, 1824, in Gamble, John M. The Memorial of Lt. John M. Gamble, of the U. S. Marine Corps, to Congress 1828. New York: George F. Hopkins & Son, 1828, p. 7.
Johnston, Samuel Burr. Letters Written During a Residence of Three Years in Chili. Erie, Penn.: R. I. Curtis, 1816.
Poinsett, Joel Roberts. Letter to Secretary of State James Monroe, August 5, 1813 (1814 sic). Poinsett Papers, Library of the Historical Museum of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Poinsett, Joel Roberts. Letter to Joseph Johnson, September 2, 1813. Poinsett Papers, Library of the Historical Museum of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Porter, David. Letter to Viceroy Abascal, March 26, 1813, in Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to The Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Chapter 8
Dixon, Manley. Letter to J. W. Croker, June 21, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Dixon, Manley. Orders to James Hillyar, July 1, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Feltus, William M. Diary entry, June 25, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Montgomery, Alexander M. Letter to John M. Gamble, July 15, 1813, in Gamble, John M. The Memorial of Lt. John M. Gamble, of the U. S. Marine Corps, to Congress 18
28. New York: George F. Hopkins & Son, 1828, p. 8.
Neumann, William. “United States Aid to the Chilean Wars of Independence,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 27, No. 2 (May 1947), pp. 204–219.
Porter, David. Letter to Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, July 2, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Porter, David. Letter to Edward Cary, July 23, 1813, in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.
Spears, John R. David G. Farragut. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1905.
Tagart, Edward. Memoir of the Late Peter Heywood, R. N. London: Effingham Wilson, 1832.
Chapter 9
Dening, Greg. Readings/Writings. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998, pp. 159–178.
Farragut, David Glasgow. “Some Reminiscences of Early Life,” in William S. Dudley and Michael J. Crawford, eds., The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985; electronically published by American Naval Records Society, Bolton Landing, New York, 2011.
Farragut, Loyall. The Life of David Glasgow Farragut. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1879.
Melville, Herman. Typee. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.
Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1815.