Perilous Fight Read online

  “The Americans,” he said simply, “… have brought us to speak of them with respect.”10

  ANYONE WHO writes about the navy of America’s early years walks in the footsteps of a remarkable group of scholars at the U.S. Navy’s Naval Historical Center (now the Naval History & Heritage Command), who for decades have tirelessly edited and made accessible in published form compendious collections of original documents, most recently three monumental volumes relating to the War of 1812. These works are models of scholarship, clarity, and judicious selection, as well as being beautifully produced books that are a true national treasure. I would add my personal thanks to Charles E. Brodine Jr. and Margherita M. Desy of the historical center for sharing their knowledge, expertise, and time in many ways. Mr. Brodine went well above and beyond the call of duty in generously sharing with me several hard-to-find images that appear in this book, as well as helping me locate other key materials; Ms. Desy spent most of a day giving me a fascinating and deeply informed tour of the magnificently restored frigate Constitution in Boston and subsequently answering my many questions about shipbuilding, seamanship in the age of sail, and much else. I am also very much indebted to Margherita Desy, Frederick Leiner, and William Cook for reading my manuscript and providing many corrections and suggestions and much sage advice.

  I would like to thank the staffs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England; The National Archives in London; the Library of Congress Manuscript Division; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Earl Gregg Swem Library Special Collections Research Center at the College of William and Mary; the South Caroliniana Library; and the Duke University Special Collections Library for their untiring professionalism and eagerness to assist. And I again would like to give my personal thanks to my dear friends Peter and Celia David, who have both put me up and put up with me on my research trips to London.

  Method of sailing a ship in distressed condition (Lever, Young Officer’s Sheet Anchor)

  CHAPTER 1

  In Barbary

  THAT AMERICA would have a navy at all in 1812 on the eve of her mad war against Britain was the direct result of events of a decade before that had spoken more to the young nation’s heart than to her mind. The American mind was dead set against the temptations that the republic’s founders believed always led governments to war and tyranny. A solid majority of America’s political leaders opposed on principle the very notion of a standing navy, a solid majority of Americans opposed the taxes that would be required to pay for one, and no sane American of any political inclination thought that any navy their country could ever possess would be able to contend with those of the great European powers.

  Yet from the Anglophile merchants of New England to the backwoods farmers on the frontier, Americans had been stirred by the glory that had been won by the captains and men of the tiny United States navy in worlds far away ever since its founding in 1794, and it was that glory that had kept the service alive against all rational calculation to the contrary.

  Edward Preble had no illusions about the price to be paid for that glory. “People who handle dangerous weapons,” he once wrote, “must expect wounds and Death.”1 Preble was a man of action to the core, possessed of a legendary decisiveness and a volcanic temper. Just a year before joining his country’s young navy in 1798 as a not-so-young thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant, Preble had taken exception to something a fellow merchant sailor had said to him in Boston, and cracked him over the head with a musket. Preble ended up paying his victim’s room and board and medical bills while he recovered, then gave him $200 for his troubles; he never apologized, though.2

  The first week of February 1804 found Commodore Edward Preble, forty-two years old, captain of the frigate Constitution and commander of America’s six-ship Mediterranean squadron, going prematurely bald and gray. His dark blue eyes were as fierce as ever, but he was increasingly given to bouts of racking physical debilitation from a griping stomach complaint that laid him low for days at a time. On the outside he usually managed to keep up a front of self-control and even optimism; inside he was blackened by darts of despair at the task before him, at his mission in life, at the distressing run of bad luck that kept coming his way.

  Just a year before taking command of the Constitution the previous May, he had tried to resign his commission from the navy altogether, pleading his shattered state of health, which had kept him bedridden more often than not for weeks on end. Writing the secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, with his decision, Preble had enclosed a statement from his physician confirming that he was “reduced to a distressing state of debility and emaciation,” adding, “he is extremely susceptible of injury from the cares and fatigues of business.” His ship’s surgeon agreed that the burdens of the job had proved too much for a man of Preble’s hard-driving and easily provoked temperament.3

  But Secretary Smith had spurned the resignation, ordering Preble on furlough to get some rest, and slowly his health had improved enough for him to return to the endless vexations of commanding one of the three plum ships of the tiny American fleet. For more than two years the American squadron in the Mediterranean had been waging an anemic battle against the Barbary corsairs that were raiding American ships traversing the region. For centuries the semi-independent Muslim states of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli had flourished on piracy and tribute extorted from European shippers that sailed the Mediterranean. On May 14, 1801, the pasha of Tripoli had made known his dissatisfaction with the amount of tribute he had been receiving from the United States in return for allowing American ships to pass unmolested: in a symbolic declaration of war, the pasha had sent his men to chop down the flagstaff in front of the American consul’s residence.

  Little had happened since. The American naval force found it could not effectively blockade Tripoli’s harbor and had been reduced to defensive measures, convoying American ships rather than directly confronting the Tripolitan corsairs. American consuls in the region warned that the United States’ prestige was plummeting—as was her navy’s, both at home and abroad. Jefferson’s cabinet, true to the antinavalist credo of the Republican party, was strongly inclined to simply pay off the pasha and be done with it; Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin wrote the president that he considered the decision “a mere matter of calculation whether the purchase of peace is not cheaper than the expense of a war.”4

  Preble’s and the Constitution’s mission was to prove them wrong; or at least to prove that the navy had some value at all. Painfully aware how much was riding on their mission, the secretary of the navy confidently let be it known in Washington that Preble would be on station ten weeks from the date of receiving his orders. Instead, the months had slipped by as Preble struggled to get his ship seaworthy. The Constitution was only five years old but was literally rotting away at her moorings. She had served with distinction during America’s undeclared naval war with France from 1798 to 1800—the Quasi War, as it came to be called, triggered by French captures of American merchant ships trading with Britain and then by a wave of popular anger over the XYZ Affair, when an American delegation sent to Paris to resolve the rising tensions was approached by three agents of the French government who demanded a large bribe. In May 1800, a detachment of sailors and marines from the Constitution staged a daring cutting-out raid on a harbor in Haiti, seizing a French privateer and recapturing an American merchant brig; two days later the Constitution’s men exhibited equal derring-do in snatching another French privateer from under the guns of a nearby port in Hispaniola. But with the signing of a peace treaty between America and France in September 1800, the ship had returned to Boston after one final cruise in the West Indies, and since June 1802 she had lain utterly neglected, accumulating weeds and decay, in the Charles River near Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard.

  On May 20, 1803, Preble had come aboard, inspected her skeleton crew of one midshipman, one boatswain, and twelve men, and ordered a caulking stage brought alongside so he c
ould examine the ship’s bottom. The next day he climbed out onto the stage armed with a rake and began pulling up swaths of sea grass that had grown through gaping holes in the copper sheathing below the waterline.

  Through the spring and summer of 1803 Preble worked day after day, morning to night, making “every exertion in my power,” he wrote an old acquaintance, denying himself even “the pleasure of dining with a friend” as he urged the work on.5 Every seam of the frigate’s planking had to be recaulked, a job that required all of the officers’ rooms alongside the wardroom to be knocked out. There were cables to be made and tarred, ballast to be brought in, fifty-four thousand gallons of water in casks to be loaded, all new yards to be fitted, all of the ship’s rigging to be removed and rerigged. For the damaged copper sheathing to be replaced, the ship first had to be brought over to a wharf at Boston’s North End, just across the mouth of the Charles River, and all her guns and nearly all her ballast laboriously removed. Then the gunports had to be hammered shut and temporarily caulked tight to make them waterproof, everything that might slide around had to be unloaded and the rudder unshipped, and then each day she was tipped over and held at a frightening angle by huge ten-inch-thick ropes running from her lower masts to a capstan on the wharf alongside. Massive poles braced the masts against the edge of the deck to take the strain as the ship was heaved over, exposing her side all the way down to the keel, while relieving tackles running from the opposite side made sure she did not capsize altogether. Carpenters set to work from a stage, ripping off the old copper sheets and filling the exposed seams beneath with oakum. Then came a coating of tallow, tar, and turpentine; then sheets of tarred paper roofing felt; then finally the new sheets of copper hammered on. Sailing Master Nathaniel Haraden—his nickname was “Jumping Billy”—oversaw the backbreaking schedule; work started at 5:15 each morning, and the laborers kept at it until seven at night, with an hour off for breakfast and dinner and fifteen minutes for grog at eleven and four. Some captains had found Haraden hard to take for having “assumed too much” in telling them how to run their ship, but the fact was no one knew the Constitution better, and the log Haraden kept of the repair operation spoke of a man justifiably proud of his mastery of the myriad technical complexities the job entailed. Preble told Secretary of the Navy Smith he thought Haraden knew his job and that he could keep him in line when he had to.6

  By August 9 the Constitution at last was ready to sail, awaiting only a favorable wind to carry her out of Boston harbor. Preble wrote a farewell letter to an old friend from Maine, Henry Dearborn, now Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of war. “I assure you I am not in pursuit of pleasure—excepting such as the destruction of the piratical vessels in the Mediterranean can afford me,” Preble wrote. “If Tripoli does not make peace, I shall hazard to destroy their vessels in port if I cannot meet them at sea.”

  And he added: “None but a real friend would have given me the kind advice which you have respecting the government of temper. Be assured it shall be attended to.”7

  · · ·

  NOTHING ABOUT his command was calculated to improve the new commodore’s temper. One early and spirited display of his legendary short fuse, however, did him some good with the officers and men under his command who were already growing weary of what one midshipman, Charles Morris, termed their captain’s “ebullitions of temper.” Nearing the Straits of Gibraltar on the evening of September 10, the Constitution’s lookout had spotted through the lowering haze just at sunset a distant sail, tracking the same course but far ahead. A few hours later, dark night settled in and they were suddenly on her: the same ship, apparently, and almost certainly a ship of war. The Constitution’s crew was brought swiftly and silently to their action quarters—no beating of the drums, but every gun crew at its station, gunports open and guns run out, the men peering down their barrels at the stranger, slow matches smoldering at the ready to set off their charges the instant the order to fire came. Only then did Preble give the customary hail.

  “What ship is that?”

  Across the water a defiant echo came back: “What ship is that?”

  “This is the United States ship Constitution. What ship is that?”

  Again the question was repeated, again with the same result. At which Preble grabbed the speaking trumpet and, his voice strained with rage, shouted, “I am now going to hail you one last time. If a proper answer is not returned, I will fire a shot into you.”

  “If you fire a shot, I will fire a broadside.”

  “What ship is that?” Preble thundered one last time.

  “This is His Britannic Majesty’s ship Donnegal, eighty-four guns, Sir Richard Strahan, an English commodore. Send your boat on board.”

  Now the volcano erupted. Leaping to the netting, Preble bellowed, “This is the United States ship Constitution, forty-four guns, Edward Preble, an American commodore, who will be damned before he sends his boat aboard any vessel.” And then, turning to his crew, he bellowed an equally loud, and theatrical, aside. “Blow on your matches, boys!”

  An ominous silence ensued, broken by the sound of a boat splashing down and rowing across. A shamefaced British lieutenant came on deck and apologetically explained that his ship was in fact the frigate Maidstone, no eighty-four-gun ship of the line at all. Her lookouts had been caught napping, and they had not seen the Constitution until they heard her hail; they had no expectation of encountering an American ship of war in these waters, and uncertain of her true identity and desperate to buy time to get their own men to quarters, they had stalled and dissembled.

  The apologies were accepted; more important, as Morris later recalled, “this was the first occasion that had offered to show us what we might expect from our commander, and the spirit and decision which he displayed were hailed with pleasure by all, and at once mitigated the unfriendly feelings” that their commander’s irascibility had produced.8

  Throughout the fall of 1803 the commodore was vexed by the subtleties of Levantine politics, the difficulties of securing reliable translations of Arabic and Turkish documents, and a furious altercation with Commodore John Rodgers, who insisted that as senior captain, owing to the earlier date of his commission, only he was entitled to fly a commodore’s broad pennant on the Mediterranean station. Then disaster: on November 24, on the passage from Gibraltar to Malta, the Constitution spoke a passing British frigate that gave them the appalling news that the Tripolitans had captured the American frigate Philadelphia and all her crew on the last day of October. The available facts were few but devastating. Chasing a corsair running into Tripoli harbor, the American frigate had struck a shoal and helplessly surrendered to Tripolitan gunboats that had poured out from the town; the enemy had since refloated her, and she now stood in Tripoli harbor, snug under the guns of the forts that ringed the shoreline. “This affair distresses me beyond description,” Preble confessed to the secretary of the navy in a dispatch two weeks later, “and very much deranges my plans of operation for the present.”

  Although Preble never publicly let slip a word of criticism of the Philadelphia’s officers, he poured out his despair and dismay in his private letters. To the secretary he continued:

  I fear our national character will sustain an injury with the Barbarians—would to God, that the Officers and crew of the Philadelphia, had one and all, determined to prefer death to slavery; it is possible that such a determination might save them from either.… If it had not been for the Capture of the Philadelphia, I have no doubt, but we should have had peace with Tripoly in the Spring; but I now have no hopes of such an event—… I do not believe the Philadelphia will ever be of service to Tripoly; I shall hazard much to destroy her—it will undoubtedly cost us many lives, but it must be done. I am surprised she was not rendered useless, before her Colours were struck.9

  And in a letter to his wife, he laid bare how much the circumstances of the Philadelphia’s loss had racked him, heart and soul, beyond the blow to his operational plans: “Captain Bainbridge, toge
ther with all his officers and crew, amounting to 307 men, are slaves and are treated in the most cruel manner, without a prospect of ever again beholding their friends. I hope to God such will never be my fate! The thought of never again seeing you would drive me to distraction … May Heaven preserve us both.… I most sincerely pity the cruel fate of poor Bainbridge. I know not what will become of them. I suspect very few will ever see home again.”10 There were reports that the pasha of Tripoli was going to demand $3 million as ransom for his prisoners. “A pretty good asking price,” Preble sarcastically observed.11

  Adding to Preble’s troubles were a raft of vexations large and small. The Constitution was in need of repairs again. Chafing under Preble’s stern discipline, a half-dozen crew members had deserted and taken refuge on British warships; he was constantly doling out punishments for drunkenness and neglect of duty, two or three dozen lashes apiece, throwing a man in irons for “impertinence.”

  Syracuse, the port town in southern Sicily where Preble had decided to base his squadron and where the Constitution began to undergo three weeks of repairs in late November, proved a constant headache, and a discipline problem too. Things had started well. The local officials and leading citizens hastened to make the Americans welcome, and the town’s somnambulant economy had undergone an instant revival with the sudden influx of dollars. Two new hotels in the “English style” had opened to cater to the Americans; the leading opera singers of Sicily had hastened to Syracuse when word went out across the island that American officers showed their appreciation for their favorite performers by throwing gold coins on the stage. “The Inhabitants are extremely friendly and civil, and our Sailors cannot desert,” Preble optimistically reported to Secretary Smith on December 10, 1803.12