(from A.B.C. Whipple,
Tall Ships and Great Captains)
ONE GENERATION after the Revolutionary War, the United States grappled again with Great Britain in the War of 1812. As Wellington and Napoleon fought on the continent, “trading with the enemy” became an anathema for both sides. With England dominating the sea lanes, President James Madison recommended and a divided Congress declared war on England. Poorly prepared for war, the United States, with only sixteen ships of the line, rallied under the slogan: “Free Trade and Sailors Rights.” The British interdiction of American shipping and the impressments of British-born sailors snatched off American ships were particularly galling. Furthermore, the British in Canada were suspected of supporting the Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and The Prophet, and the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe was perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
The War of 1812 lasted for two years. It encompassed: several desultory attempts to invade Canada and cut the British supply lines; a number of successful sea battles (the Constitution over the Guerrière, the United States over the Macedonian, and the Hornet over the Peacock which gave heart to America; the step by step extension of a British blockade along the east coast that slowly strangled shipping; Commodore Perry’s ferocious battle on Lake Erie (“We have met the enemy and they are ours”); and the British landing and burning of Washington, D.C., where Dolley Madison saved a portrait of George Washington moments before the British arrived to torch the White House. In the south Gen. Andrew Jackson waged a brilliant defense of New Orleans and later seized Pensacola, Florida. This foot-in-the-door helped persuade Spain to sell Florida to the United States in 1819 for five million dollars.
In the beginning, the government issued a “letter of marque” to privateer businessmen who would arm their own ships. Any booty from English ships seized went to the owner, captain, and crew. The key to success for a privateer was a light, well armed, fast sailing ship that could overtake and capture merchant ships, and outrun, but not outgun, a British man of-war.
One such privateer was the Prince de Neufchâtel built in 1813 in New York, and owned by Mme. Flory Charretton, an American citizen. Her daring son-in-law, John Ordronoux, captained the Prince.
One hundred and seven feet long at the waterline, twenty-six feet in breadth, eleven black gun ports on each side, her outstanding visual characteristics were her yellow sides and her sharply raked masts designed for lightning speed. She was chased seventeen times, but never caught. She was estimated to have reached twelve knots during one chase. She captured a score of ships in the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Before returning to America, she had earned almost three million dollars. Off Nantucket, Ordronoux spotted and pounced on the British merchantman Douglas bound for Liverpool. We now experience the Prince of Neufchâtel’s mortal combat with H.M.S. Endymion, a British frigate. The story is told by that great spinner of nautical yarns, A. B. C. Whipple in Tall Ships and Great Captains.
SHE FIRST CAME into view off the island’s south shore. From Mill Hill, the highest spot on Nantucket Island, they could see her as a speck, then slowly taking shape as the fading winds eased her toward the point. As she approached, the watchers on the hill could also make out the ship she had in tow. A little later they saw that she and her companion were being pursued.
The thing about her that most struck the watchers on the hill was the angle of her masts, raked back at almost seventy-five degrees. With these masts and her lean hull, low in the water, she looked fast. But she was not at the moment; with what must have been every sail in her locker, she was straining to make headway in the fleeting airs. She was what is called a hermaphrodite schooner—not quite a schooner, but almost. Like a schooner she carried fore-and-aft sails on both her main and fore masts. Like a brig she carried square sails on both masts too, the square top sails towering above the fore-and-aft sails below. She was very much like a brigantine as well; only the schooner’s foresail made her different. On a curious little royal pole atop her mainmast and on her elongated bowsprit she carried clouds of canvas, conveying the impression of the speed she would carry under ordinary winds. Even now, with scarcely a ripple on the waters off Nantucket’s south shore, she moved slowly ahead. Her lines, the American flag on her masthead, the thin line of her gun ports along her sides all identified her as a U.S. privateer. That meant that the second vessel, a small, square-rigged ship, under full sail but keeping pace only with the aid of the tow line, was the privateer’s prize. And it meant that the third vessel, off to the south, was a British frigate.
The pursuer was only half a dozen miles away, but her bulk loomed on the horizon as she came down on her prey. The breezes that only flickered along the island’s shore still held a bit more strongly farther out at sea. The frigate crowded on all sail while they lasted, before darkness gave the privateer a chance to escape.
On the hill the windmills had ceased creaking as the wind dropped. Across the moors between Mill Hill and the south shore the colors changed as the sun settled off to the right. Few, probably none, of the islanders who stood and watched the slow motion chase knew the name of the privateer or her prize. Some, though, were no doubt able to identify the frigate. She was the H.M.S. Endymion, on patrol duty off the Atlantic coast. She had been sent from her station off New York to Halifax for repairs, and on her return had sighted the privateer and her prize. The Endymion had been in the waters before. The frigate’s assignment was to patrol the coast, awe the “colonists,” blockade their seaborne commerce and destroy privateers. This was her intent as she came ponderously down toward the schooner.
Presumably, in light airs, the privateer could get away, if the frigate did not catch a strong slant of wind first. But the privateer was working in toward the shifting sand bars where the water shoaled off to a few feet. If the privateer captain caught a breeze and tried to cut across the tip of the island, especially in the dark, he could get trapped in the narrow channel between Old Man Shoal and Miacomet Rip. It was partly to warn the privateer captain and partly to find out what ship she was, that one islander decided to launch a boat from the south shore and go out to her.
He was Charles Hilburn, a pilot who knew all the shoals and rip tides around the island. When Hilburn announced that he was going out to the schooner, three or four Nantucketers said they would join him. This was not an easy decision to make on Nantucket during the War of 1812.
Nantucket lies thirty miles out to sea, off the tip of the Massachusetts coast. Exposed, isolated, out of sight of the nearest land, the island’s location helped mold the individualistic, independent character of its inhabitants. But in wartime Nantucket was defenseless. During the Revolution the islanders had been visited by British raiding parties and had asked the new U.S. government for protection, in vain. In the War of 1812 the pattern was repeated. The American Navy could not spare a patrol for one island, and Nantucket could hardly arm a navy of her own. So her people accepted the hard alternative; they had declared themselves neutral. The British admiral in command of the area, Sir Alexander Cochrane, had exacted a high price. On September, 1814, after nearly two years of delaying, Nantucket’s selectmen had agreed to pay no taxes to the U.S. government, and the admiral had agreed to let the islanders go unhindered to the mainland for wood and to the Grand Banks for fish. That was one month before sails of the privateer and her British pursuer appeared off Nantucket’s south shore.
So the islanders faced a dilemma. Most of them were Quakers. It was a violation of their religious principles to take part in the war. Those who did not agree on religious grounds felt that it was a breach of their neutrality agreement to go to the aid of an American privateer in the face of a British frigate. Even putting principles aside, what would the British retaliation be? This situation was not the same as a vessel in distress because of a storm or shipwreck. The privateer had made her own captures and in fact had one under tow. Capture by the British, in turn, was the chance her captain had accepted when he first set out. And if the frigate did overhaul the privateer what could the islanders do to help?
But there were others who took a less logical, more emotional attitude. Those were fellow Americans out there, and if they were not already in distress, they would soon be. If, as it appeared in the gathering dusk, a flat calm were settling on the sea for the next hour or so, an islander who knew the waters and currents could help the captain keep off the hidden shoals. And to some there must have been the furtive anticipation of striking a blow against the fleet that had harassed them for two years. So, despite the objections of some of the Quakers, Hilburn and three or four other islanders determined to go out to the privateer and lend whatever aid they could through the coming night. Climbing into their little horse-drawn carts, they bumped across the rutted road to the south shore.
By the time the boat was hauled down to the water from one of the fishing shacks along the shore, the sun was nearly down. A small crowd had tramped across the wide sand beach to watch. The privateer lay about half a mile out, her yellow sides turning reddish in the sunset. The last breeze had gone. The schooner’s anchor was down. She rolled in the swells coming off the Atlantic. The prize has been cast loose and had anchored as well. To the south the frigate Endymion was barely moving. The cold dampness of the October evening seeped in off the sea. There were no demonstration from the huddled band on the beach as the boat crunched over the last bit of sand and slapped against the waves. There must, however, have been a few murmured good-byes from the wives and mothers who realized what the night had in store.
To the rhythmic slap-slap of bow against water and the thump of oars against tholepins, the islanders worked their way out to the schooner. She rose suddenly out of the dusk ahead of them, the current chirping around her anchor chain and bow, her raked masts lifting into the sky, her yellow hull splotched with powder stains at the gun ports. Because of her long, low design, her bulwarks were almost near enough to the water for the men to climb aboard from the boat. But first, softly in the quiet night, there was the hail and reply, and the islanders learned their identity.
She was the privateer Prince de Neufchâtel; John Ordronoux, master. Captain Ordronoux happily accepted the offer of Hilburn and his companions. The Nantucketers climbed aboard. When they looked around her disordered decks and saw what they had let themselves in for, some of them must have wished that they had stayed on shore.
The brutal wear and tear of many battles showed everywhere—in the chipped masts and spars, the patched sails, the spliced halyards. Out of an original crew that should have numbered 150, the Prince de Neufchâtel had fewer than forty men; the rest had gone to man the prizes that Ordronoux had sent into American or neutral port. But a more ominous price of the privateer’s victories was evident in the sounds that came from below: the rumbling of thirty-seven prisoners who were confined in her hold and were growing restless at the preparations for battle.
Captain Ordronoux had no time for amenities at the moment. His reinforcements were quickly put to work readying the Prince for defense. The calm, if it held, meant that there would be no ship-to-ship engagement. That was just as well, since the Endymion mounted forty guns and the Prince eighteen. But the alternative prospect was little better: a battle that could be murderous under such conditions. The decision to launch this kind of battle was up to the captain of the Endymion. If there were no breeze, he could not come up close enough for the classic exchange of broadsides. He could, however, try an attack with his boats.
Nearly everything favored the attacker in such a maneuver. The privateer could be expected to have a skeleton crew. Even from a distance her shape would indicate her low bulwarks, making her easy to board. The Endymion’s captain could fill four or five boats with marines and send them down to slip along side the schooner, swarm onto her decks and overpower her defenses. All this was obvious to Captain Ordronoux as it was to the British captain, and the privateer skipper hurried his defenses.
Every weapon that could be armed was readied. The gun ports were swung open. The guns were double-shotted and tilted to aim downward at approaching boats. Muskets by the dozens were loaded and stacked along the bulwarks. Baskets filled with loaded pistols were placed within easy reach. The schooner’s sides were slushed with grease, to make it more difficult for attackers to climb aboard. Hammocks of netting were fashioned above the bulwarks, and cannon balls were suspended in them. One swipe of a cutlass would drop them into the boats when they came along side. More cannon balls were piled on deck, to be thrown over the side into the boats that those in the netting missed. Stations were allotted along the rail. Captain Ordronoux went about explaining each man’s mission. By now all light had gone. In the hushed darkness of the night everyone took his station and waited.
The scene can be imagined. The dead calm lay heavily on the sea. Beyond the narrow, visible rim of water the island was lost, its presence revealed only by an occasional flickering light. The swells were slow and smooth, rocking the schooner gently at her anchor. Now and then there would be the creak of a mast as the schooner rolled, or the slap of a sail which has been brailed up out of the way of action but ready to be loosed at the first wisp of a breeze. From the island’s shore would come the mew of a gull, the squawk of a fish hawk. All other sounds would be hushed—the men on the deck of the privateer treading quietly on their toes, conversing in whispers so as not to reveal the schooner’s presence to the attackers they knew must come. And now, as they waited, …the signal sounded softly down the deck. The boats were coming.
At sea at night there is nearly always the sensation that the visibility is better than on land. There is always the contrast between the blackness along the water’s surface and the lighter tone of the sky. The lookout at sea makes the most of this contrast. It was what the men aboard the privateer were doing that night. But apparently the first warning came to the ear rather than the eye, as someone heard the thump of a muffled oar.
God only knows how many boats there were out there. But gradually the dark, low shapes became visible on the water, moving silently and swiftly, bow-on to present the smallest target, straight for the sides of the Prince de Neufchâtel.
It was a few moments before everyone could hear the rubbing of the oars and the drip-drip of water as the boats were stroked toward the target. Their outlines could be made out plainly by now. Five boats were coming in at different angles, toward bow and stern quarters. The attackers themselves were huddled in poised tenseness. Waiting just as tensely at the rail of the Prince, the defenders studied the overwhelming numbers of marines and strained to catch the sound of the first boat thumping against the schooner’s side, when the night exploded.
At Captain Ordronoux’s orders a battery of the Prince’s guns had opened fire on the boats. Evidently he had waited too long, and the boats had crept in under the guns’ angle of fire, because the broadside missed. But Ordronoux had had the guns loaded with langrage too—iron bars, chain, spikes and other murderous short-range junk. The crashing explosions of the guns were followed by the shrill screams of the attackers as whistling shards of metal cut them up and whirring lengths of chain garroted them. Their cries were taken up in the other boats as they launched the attack.
From the deck of the Prince it looked like fireworks as the British muskets went off, and the toughest privateersmen must have been chilled by the battle cries of so many men. The boats now came thumping alongside the Prince and the marines made their first attempt to swarm aboard. But the defenders along the rail, not three feet away from the men reaching up from the boats, fought them off with desperation. Some who had waited, cradling heavy cannon balls in their aching arms, hefted them high and sent them hurtling into the boats below. There were crunching sounds of splintering wood, thundering splashes as the balls caromed off into the water, shrieks as skulls were fractured. Other defenders peered over the rail, gingerly to avoid getting picked in the eye by a rapier, and fired pistols into the milling masses below. In the flashes of gunfire the faces of the marines stood out, the whites of their teeth and eyes in contrast to their blackened faces. Other privateersmen swung their cutlasses in shimmering arcs, thwacking against the sides of the schooner as they chopped at reaching arms and sliced off grasping fingers. The ship and the boats became a tangled pandemonium of cursing, shouting and screaming as the attack reached battle pitch. And so far the privateersmen were beating off the first wave.
As the pulse of the battle mounted, so did the din. The shouting of the men along the rail was answered by the moans and yells coming up from the attackers in the boats. On deck there was the constant rattle of gunfire, the clatter of empty pistols and muskets being tossed aside and the scramble of powder boys reloading them. And from below decks came the echoing and re-echoing yells of the prisoners. As the battle churned above them, they stormed against the barred companionway and the hatch grating, trying to take advantage of the opportunity to break free. So the Prince de Neufchâtel was beset from all sides and from within as well. Straining at her anchor as the strong currents rushed passed, rocking under the weight of men surging from side to side, her sails lit by flashes of gunfire, her yards wreathed in smoke, she appeared like a hell ship on which hundreds of demons had run amuck.
Actually her decks were defended by less than forty men, some American, some French like her skipper, some Swedish like her first mate. Still they managed to keep 111 British marines from coming aboard. But they could not hold out much longer. They were firing their pistols and muskets much faster than the boys could reload them. Most of the cannon balls on deck had been dropped into the boats below, and apparently had only sunk one. The balls in the netting had mostly been cut away, with little more effect. The defenders at the rail were slipping in smears of blood. The rail itself was a jagged chunk of splinters where knives and cutlasses had chopped at the hands of marines trying to pull themselves aboard. One by one the privateersmen were dropping on the deck or toppling over the side. Captain Ordronoux, counting the forces and assessing the tide of battle, could see that it was finally going against him. In fact, at this point he could not count more than twenty privateersmen fighting. The rest were sprawled on deck or gone. Below him the uproar of the prisoners indicated that they were on the verge of smashing their way out. Then the marines from the boats under the bow came climbing over the rail and onto the forecastle deck.
Ordronoux was waiting for them with his last defense, a deck gun loaded and aimed toward the bow. He gave the prearranged signal for his men to scramble aft out of the line of fire, but he could not wait for them all. The British marines were already swarming down the deck toward him. Ordronoux fired.
The gun was loaded with canister shot and bags of musket balls. Like a huge spray of buckshot it swept the deck. The marines went down like mowed grass.
But so did most of Ordronoux’s crew. Now all the remaining marines had to do was launch one more attack, from the waist or stern of the schooner. There were not enough privateersmen left to hold them off, even for a few moments while Ordronoux swung his deck gun into position. The next attack would be the last.
It never came. In the boats below, the plunging cannon balls, the musketry and the pistol fire had done their work, and the carnage on deck had finished the job. Not only were there no more boarding attempts, but faintly above the din came the cry of a boat commander: “Quarter! Quarter! Quarter!”
A few more shots and it was over. Looking about his deck, Ordronoux discovered that he had exactly eight crew members left. Peering over the bulwarks, he could make out only one of the five British boats; three (it turned out) had drifted away with not enough able-bodied men to propel them. The other had sunk. In the boat still alongside, only here and there did a man move. At least ninety British had been killed, and at least thirty privateersmen. The battle had lasted twenty minutes.
The contrast between the din of battle and the hush that followed was enough to make Ordronoux’s ears ring. Now the only sounds were from the deck and from alongside, the thumping of the boat still made fast to the Prince’s side, the whimpering of a dying powder boy. Even the howling of the prisoners below had suddenly ceased, as they listened for a sign that would tell them who had won. The acrid smoke of gunpowder hung heavily in the air. And off to the south, the Endymion sent up rockets, signaling in vain for her boats to return.
Captain Ordronoux, alone on his quarterdeck binding his wounds, realized that in fact the battle was not yet won. Few British marines in the boat along side were able to move about, but there were more able-bodied men than he had left. His first mate was wounded. The pilot, Charles Hilburn, who had come out to offer his services, had kept his station at the schooner’s helm despite several wounds; finally he had been killed. The Prince’s surgeon was injured. Ahead of Ordronoux and his eight remaining able-bodied men lay the job of tending the wounded and preparing the dead for later burial at sea. More important, it would not be long before the British survivors realized that they could still take the Prince.
Summoning his eight men, Ordronoux got the British boat hauled toward the bow of the schooner and tied up there. The boat’s commander called up to him asking for help; some of his wounded men would not live until morning if they did not get medical help. Ordronoux replied that his surgeon was wounded and that he could not help. He was sorry, but the commander would have to make do with the dressings which Ordronoux would pass down. Ordronoux then set about making his own men as comfortable as he could until morning.
It was a long night. Men cried out as they were moved onto pallets. Others sobbed unceasingly. Once in a while the night was split by the scream of a man gone into delirium. Little by little the sounds tapered off, as some became unconscious and others died. When light blue dawn first streaked the sky out toward the Grand Banks, Ordronoux put into effect what he had planned through the night.
Just aft of the mainmast he had a sail strung across most of the schooner’s deck. From his cabin he brought out a fife, and he put two of his remaining men into service. In time with the fife the two men pranced back and forth across the deck, stamping as heavily as they could. Ordronoux hoped that in the boat tied near the bow the British survivors would think that the privateer captain ran a taut ship, and still had enough men for a morning muster.
Off to the north the dim shape of the island slowly revealed the green hills, the brightly colored October moors, the south shore and a knot of people who stood at the water’s edge as if they had waited there all night. Astern, dangerously near the shore the Prince’s prize lay at anchor. Outward toward Old Man Shoal, Ordronoux could make out three British boats drifting helplessly, the arms of wounded or dead marines hanging over the side. And off toward the south, her acres of canvas still hanging in the windless air, sat the Endymion.
Ordronoux went forward and told the boat commander, a lieutenant named Ormond, that he could go ashore to get help for his wounded. He expected a truce while some of his own wounded were sent to the island for treatment. Ormond agreed. Slowly the barge went off, rowed by a couple of men each, to pick up the three drifting boats and head toward the island. They were followed shortly by a boat from the Prince, carrying her most seriously wounded and taking the one or two Nantucket survivors home. By the time they reached the shore, the little group of islanders had increased to a crowd, and men waded into the waves to help unload the sprawled bodies, of attacker and defender alike.
All that day the British frigate and American privateer sat within sight of each other. Though an occasional breeze ruffled her sails, the Endymion made no move toward her quarry. Aboard the Prince Captain Ordronoux worked to be ready to flee as soon as his boat returned. Aboard the Endymion Captain Henry Hope wrote his account of the battle, adding that he had apparently lost more men in this action against a schooner than he would have lost in action against another frigate. He did not so record, but Nantucketers claimed that he did not even make the gesture of a chase when on the next morning the privateer’s boat returned, sail was loosed to a light breeze and the Prince de Neufchâtel moved off, setting her course northeast to round the tip of Cape Cod.