Читать книгу The Naval War of 1812 - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 4

Table of Contents

JOHN RODGERS was a man of forty, nearly forty-one. He had seen a good deal of war; as first lieutenant of the Constellation under Truxtun he had taken possession of the French Insurgente after the action which resulted in her capture and in his own promotion to captain at the age of twenty-eight; and he had demonstrated his seamanship by taking the wrecked prize into St Kitts despite heavy weather and a restive mass of prisoners. As captain of the John Adams he had fought and destroyed the Tripolitan Meshouda; and he had had long practical experience during the Tripolitan war of keeping his ship efficient far from a base. Most important of all, he had had experience as commander-in-chief on active service, holding command of the American Mediterranean squadron three thousand miles from Washington. He was a thoughtful member of his profession, in a navy which was notably inclined to the debate and discussion of professional problems. At the moment of the outbreak of war his name was best known as the captain of the President which, the year before, had cut up the Little Belt in an accidental night action off Cape Henry.

For the past two years he had held command, as commodore, of a squadron made up of nearly every ship-of-war the United States possessed, patrolling, under orders from the Secretary of the Navy, American territorial waters so as to set some bounds on the behaviour of the Royal Navy. His stern orders to his captains had reflected his own concern regarding the dignity of the United States and the prestige of the American Navy. The appointment was a fortunate one; Rodgers had two years in which to drill his ships in conditions approaching those of active service, to work out, in continual discussion with the brilliant officers under his command, the problems of the coming war, and to evolve and perfect systems of tactics adapted to varied conditions and armaments. In two years of hard work a man like Rodgers could achieve a great deal, despite the fact that during this period of humiliation the United States Navy suffered a steady drain as disgusted officers resigned their commissions or went on half pay. The years of Rodgers’s command from 1810 to 1812 must have been far more important in the development of the American Navy than the better-remembered ‘Prison School’ which David Porter instituted among the captive officers of the Philadelphia in Tripoli.

With war declared, Rodgers had to put into action the plans he had evolved regarding the employment of America’s naval force. Under his command in New York he had a powerful striking force, the two big frigates President and United States, the smaller frigate Congress, the sloop Hornet and the brig Argus; his other frigate, the Essex, was undergoing repairs. He had received little help from the Government in reaching any decision; indeed at one moment Mr Madison had decided that in the event of war the United States ships would be better employed as floating batteries, and had only been persuaded to countermand the order by the urgent representations of two good captains—Bainbridge and Stewart—who happened to be in Washington.

Official intimation of the declaration of war reached Rodgers in New York three days after the resolution of Congress, but no orders accompanied it. That was only to be expected of an Administration which had never displayed any understanding of the problems of sea power. The Administration had indeed gone as far as to request suggestions from several captains, but it had not yet had time to digest them, and the orders eventually issued—almost a week after the declaration of war—show no sign of having been influenced in the least by the recommendations of Rodgers or Decatur or Bainbridge.

But Rodgers did not wait for orders. His ships were ready for sea, except for the Essex, and he sailed immediately on hearing of the declaration of war—Nelson had said, ‘Lose not an hour’, and Rodgers acted in exactly that spirit. His greatest fear had been lest a superior British squadron should appear off Sandy Hook before he could get away; that was always possible, and Rodgers was fully aware of the possibility. In the two years of his command he had had every opportunity of gathering information regarding the strength of his immediate opponent.

This was Vice-Admiral Sawyer, commanding His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels at Halifax. Bermuda also came within his command, so that he faced the greater part of the American seaboard, and it was the ships of his squadron which had been most prominent in the irritating treatment of the United States. Sawyer’s force consisted of the Africa, a 64-gun ship-of-the-line (one of the smaller vessels of this class, therefore), a varying number of frigates, seven or eight usually, and some small vessels. Thus he had a considerable superiority of force; two to one, possibly. In Nelson’s opinion three frigates were a match for one ship-of-the-line, but it is very much to be doubted whether the Africa could have withstood Rodgers’s two big frigates—even one of them could have fought her with a chance of success—so that unless Sawyer’s force was concentrated there was a chance of it meeting with disaster, and in less than two days one of his ships very nearly did. Sawyer’s force was not concentrated, and the hope that the powerful American squadron might encounter small portions of it influenced Rodgers’s decision to sail at once.

Not only was Rodgers’s force strong enough to deal with Sawyer’s unless the latter were concentrated, but it was also strong enough to fight the usual kind of escort provided by the Admiralty for major convoys. A typical convoying force would consist of a ship-of-the-line, one or two frigates, and one or two sloops, sufficient to cover the lumbering convoy from the attacks of privateers and capable of dealing with a stray French ship-of-the-line that might evade the blockade. If Rodgers were to encounter such a convoy and escort he could deal a shattering blow. If the escort were too strong for him to face with confidence—and not all escorts included a ship-of-the-line—he could count at least on forcing it to form line of battle so that his well-handled ships would have every opportunity of getting in among the convoy. At the least he could inflict serious losses; at most he might wipe out convoy, escort and all, and of all the possibilities open to him that was the one most likely to prevail upon the British Cabinet (if it survived such a shock, as was doubtful, or its successor if it fell, as was likely) to come to terms with the American Government, and that was the object of going to war.

So it was with the double hope of either catching some portion of Sawyer’s force or of intercepting a large convoy that Rodgers put to sea, and it was with both objects in mind that he kept his own force concentrated. In doing so he acted in a fashion contrary to the suggestions of Decatur and Bainbridge, and in a very different manner from that laid down in the orders that did not reach him. The naval officers had suggested a policy of dispersion in varying degrees, with the idea that the wider the American force was spread the greater was the chance of capturing British shipping. They missed the point that very soon American privateers would be pushing out of American ports by the dozen, by the score, even by the hundred. Among this swarm of ships Rodgers’s squadron if scattered would only constitute five more. They could snap up isolated ships, stragglers from convoys, and so forth, and would hardly do this more efficiently than the privateers. They would be incapable of dealing a heavy blow; and they would be incapable of forcing the Admiralty to maintain guard against such a blow. It might even be thought that captains of United States ships might not possess the specialized knowledge of the ways of British merchant ships that would be looked for by the owners of privateers in their captains; successful commerce destruction calls for familiarity with trade routes and seasonal variations such as might not have come the way of an officer in a regular service. And there was the further point that any increase in Rodgers’s numbers, regardless of the increase in his force, added to its efficiency in extending his field of vision. His three frigates in line, ten miles apart with visibility ten miles, could sweep an area forty miles wide; the Hornet and Argus would increase that width to sixty miles—an important consideration, because even a large convoy covers only a small area of the sea and can frequently be missed by a vessel searching for it. Merely increasing by half Rodgers’s chances of sighting a convoy made it worth while taking the smaller vessels along—at least in Rodgers’s opinion—as balanced against their chances of effecting captures when cruising independently; and in the event of a convoy being met they could be, even though of small use in the line of battle, most efficacious in attacking the merchant vessels while Rodgers fought the escort.

Rodgers, as a thoughtful sailor, could not help but be aware of a further consideration. A hostile force known to be at sea, and yet with its whereabouts and destination unknown, is a source of anxiety to the enemy and compels precautions disproportionately greater than its strength would appear to demand. Every vital point within its striking distance must be guarded; to make sure of intercepting it far greater total forces must be disposed over its possible routes. At one time in 1914 there were seventeen British ships-of-war trying to catch the small German cruiser Emden, and that was at a period when cable communication between shore stations made co-ordination considerably easier than in 1812. Rodgers knew that during these last few weeks, with the imminent approach of war, American merchant vessels had begun to swarm home, and part of his manifold duty was to ensure their safe entry into American harbours, and he had to do this in the face of a manifestly superior force. His disappearance out to sea with his united squadron was the most effective way of ensuring this. No single British cruiser would gladly remain at a focal point off the American coast when her captain was aware that at any moment Rodgers’s topsails might appear over the seaward horizon, cutting him off from escape; no British admiral would gladly leave his cruisers dispersed in situations inviting their destruction in detail. With Rodgers’s departure known there would be urgent British orders for concentration. The net cast to entrap American shipping would be entirely altered in character; the individual strands would have to be made stronger at the cost of making the holes infinitely larger—so large that in the event the homeward-bound shipping made its escape with remarkably small losses. Rodgers’s bold decision to take his squadron far out to sea had a profound effect on the rest of the war.

Parenthetically, it may be mentioned that the Administration had sent Rodgers orders in contemplation of the same situation; he left New York before he could receive them, fortunately, although the student of naval history may regret that they did not arrive earlier and afford a lesson in what an intelligent commander-in-chief should do on receipt of orders obviously unwise. Rodgers was instructed to divide his squadron into halves, to put one half under Decatur’s command, and to separate the halves, which were to cruise off and on from the Capes of the Chesapeake and from New York. It was only three weeks after Rodgers’s departure that Broke, with the Africa and several frigates under his command, appeared off Sandy Hook; if Rodgers had waited for orders, and had then gone out in obedience to them—in a fashion as dilatory as the Administration’s—Broke would probably have caught Decatur and his New York squadron; if he had not destroyed it he would at least have chased both Decatur and Rodgers into harbour, and could have blockaded them in the comforting certainty of knowing where they were.

As it was Broke, after keeping his squadron concentrated off New York and discovering that Rodgers had disappeared out to sea, was so anxious about the fate of a homeward-bound West Indian convoy which was guarded only by a single frigate that he went off to escort it with his squadron, still, perforce, in one mass. By the time he had seen it safely on its way and had returned to New York he had covered two thousand miles, and six weeks had elapsed—six weeks during which American ships could enter the unwatched American ports. His brief stay off Sandy Hook had been enlivened by the historic chase of the Constitution; the Constitution escaped, as will be later described, but it is necessary to point out that the knowledge that Rodgers was at sea meant that there was no British cruiser off Boston, whither the Constitution made her escape, and whence she sailed again, still unobserved, on the cruise which resulted in the capture of the Guerrière.

Rodgers’s sortie was therefore amply justified, as even Mr Madison grudgingly admitted in his message to Congress; it remains to recall the details of his voyage. It was only thirty-six hours after he sailed that he had his first opportunity of striking a serious blow, when he sighted the Belvidera, a British 32-gun frigate—seriously inferior even to the Congress, therefore—which was watching New York and yet had not heard of the declaration of war. Byron of the Belvidera was a cautious officer as well as a very capable seaman; he kept away as soon as he made out that five ships-of-war were approaching. He was under the impression that the American ships had been sent out to chase away British ships-of-war in American territorial waters, and he had no desire that his ship should figure in another Little Belt affair, when he was opposed to odds of some ten to one. He turned his stern to his pursuers and set all sail. The wind, which was fresh at the moment of sighting, grew fitful and erratic. They were out of sight of land, so that there was no question of the British ship being in territorial waters, but Byron sent his men to quarters and did his best to increase his distance from the powerful force pursuing him. With the dying away of the wind the chase was prolonged; although the American ships were almost within range they could not close, and Byron soon after midday—it was dawn when he turned away—took the opportunity of sending his men to dinner while the ships crept along through the heat, maintaining bare steerage way, all within plain sight of each other and without any communication being exchanged.

Later in the afternoon the wind freshened; the American ships felt the effects first, closing rapidly, and Rodgers in the President found himself within range, opening fire at less than half a mile with the two bow guns which would bear, Rodgers himself firing the first shot. The first three shots all hit—a tribute to American gunnery—and did considerable damage. Byron was still in doubt as to whether a state of war existed, but he gave the order to return the fire. Before he could be obeyed, however, an event took place which may have had a great deal of influence on the final result; the foremost main-deck gun in the President, above which Rodgers was standing on the forecastle, burst as it fired its second shot. Rodgers went down with a broken leg, and fifteen other men were killed or wounded. Into the confusion and consternation that ensued—although the British throughout the action were ignorant of what had happened—the Belvidera’s stern guns opened fire.

The bursting of the gun was a disaster for the Americans, but it could have been worse. The American armaments industry at the time was in its infancy, and there had been complaints as far back as the Mediterranean war about the quality of the guns. It was not an easy matter to cast large masses of metal without hidden flaws and air bubbles. At this conclusive indication that their weapons might be faulty the American gunners could excusably feel mistrust of them, and could have been chary about firing them, but they maintained their fire without hesitation. Rodgers’s wound was more disastrous, possibly. The President had to solve the problem presented to every chasing ship; whether or not it would be advantageous to yaw and turn the broadside towards the target, losing distance but multiplying tenfold the number of guns that would bear.

The problem was not capable of an easy solution by the rules of simple proportion; it was not enough to decide whether the bow guns could or could not fire ten shots during the wasted interval of getting back into range after yawing. The efficacy of each shot increased disproportionately with every decrease in range. Yawing might enable the pursued to draw away for good; on the other hand a lucky broadside might inflict so much damage on sails and rigging that the chasing ship could close to decisive range before it could be repaired. Wind and sea could vary; darkness would certainly come sooner or later. To reach a correct conclusion observing all the probabilities and possibilities called for a clear head as well as resolution and wide professional knowledge; it is possible that Rodgers, shaken by his recent experience, did not succeed in doing so, although no proof of it was possible at the time.

The President yawed and fired broadsides, and it is generally assumed that she should rather have held her course, but that is only an assumption. The Belvidera fought a good fight, maintaining an excellent return fire, replacing damaged rigging, fishing injured spars; there was no need to urge the hands to the work, because every man on board was enraged at what he could not be blamed for regarding as an unprovoked, even treacherous, attack made in overwhelming force on an unsuspecting victim. With boats cut away, water pumped out, and everything done to make every yard of distance, the Belvidera contrived to escape fatal injury; not one of the other ships of the American squadron succeeded in getting within range. Darkness came down; the wind settled so that it suited the Belvidera’s best point of sailing, and she drew away and disappeared into the night. Three days later she reached Halifax, having taken some American prizes on the way, but the cautious Sawyer, still not sure that a state of war existed, released them, and actually sent one of his precious sloops under flag of truce to ask for explanations—incidentally, the information that the Belvidera brought regarding the strength of the American squadron also led him to send hurried messages calling in every isolated ship under his command.

The pursuit and the escape had been only a tiny incident in the history of the naval wars of the time. There had been scores of similar brushes between British and French ships during the preceding years. More attention has been paid to the technical details than the occasion warrants. If the Belvidera had fallen into Rodgers’s hands the results would hardly have been important; the American public could not have been as impressed by a chance victory gained by overwhelming force as it was by the subsequent victories of American ships, and the British public had sense and experience enough—the naval history of the French wars is punctuated with records of the loss of single British ships caught by much stronger forces—not to be shaken by the loss in such circumstances of one frigate.

The real importance of the incident lay in the exasperation of the British seamen and officers at what they tended to look upon as a treacherous attack, or at least as one made in ungentlemanly fashion. Rodgers’s behaviour had been correct enough, and more than once the British Navy had taken advantage of a surprise declaration of war to reap a harvest of unsuspecting prizes, but there was considerable ill-feeling nevertheless, which was likely to embitter the struggle and make peace less easy to come by. It might have been well had it occurred to Rodgers to give the Belvidera some definite warning of the outbreak of war before he opened fire. A gesture—unnecessarily chivalrous—would have cost nothing and might have profoundly affected the subsequent relations of the two countries.

When the Belvidera was out of sight and out of reach, Rodgers, with his broken leg, had to recast his plans. Before he left New York he had received some vague information regarding the departure of a homeward-bound West Indian convoy a month or more earlier. Rodgers did not want the blow he was dealing to be a mere blow in the air. The capture of a West Indian convoy would be the most effective blow he could deal, and the hope of overtaking this one—by no means a wild hope—reinforced by his fear of being blockaded, helped in deciding him to sail instantly. The ordinary trade route to England from the West Indies took advantage of the Gulf Stream to make northing while in the north-east trade wind belt; it then took advantage of the westerlies to head for the approaches to the Channel. Rodgers, with his handy squadron, was entitled to hope that he could anticipate the arrival there of a lumbering convoy. Only an hour or two before sighting the Belvidera he had received information from an incoming American ship that she had actually sighted the convoy four days before and three hundred miles away. His pursuit of the Belvidera had hardly distracted him from the necessary course to intercept; repairs to the President hardly delayed him a moment. He headed across the Atlantic.

He ran into thick weather on the Grand Banks and carried it with him all the way, with visibility rarely more than five miles and sometimes down to zero, and yet he made a satisfactory passage, fifteen days from the Grand Banks. His hopes were sustained by reports from ships he encountered that the convoy was not far ahead, but in the thick weather that prevailed he did not sight it. He turned back on July 13, when a hundred and fifty miles from the Scillies.

It is hard to believe that he was wise to do so. In not maintaining his course for another day, in not scouring the approaches to the Channel, he was giving up his best chance of dealing a heavy blow. On the open sea a ship and even a convoy is hard to find, but Rodgers was close to a focal point where shipping was bound to be concentrated. During centuries privateer captains and U-boat commanders made a practice of seeking their prey in the approaches to the Channel. In sailing ship days even more than in the age of steam, certain areas were likely to yield a harvest, for the sailing ship, after a long passage, was bound to be somewhat uncertain of her longitude, and it was a usual practice to make a landfall by running down the latitude—a westerly sweep along 50° N. often resulted in a raider finding a victim running straight into his clutches. But Rodgers turned away when he had hardly reached the fringe of the area where he might expect to make captures. So far his movements had been bold, well-timed and effective; now they were futile. He had achieved the one objective of disrupting the British blockade of the American coast; he abandoned the other, of damaging British commerce, when it was within his grasp. A few more days of bold action could have been productive of important results. He could have pushed into the mouth of the Channel, even into the Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea. Undoubtedly there was danger in such a course; chance might have taken him into the arms of some heavy British squadron inward or outward-bound on blockade service, but it was not a very great chance and he could expect his frigates to be able to escape from ships-of-the-line. He could expect two or three weeks of freedom of action before the news of his presence would result in deliberate movement against him of forces detailed for that purpose by the Admiralty, and then it would be time enough to disappear again. In that two or three weeks he might well encounter a convoy; there could be no doubt at all that he would find plenty of coastwise shipping to harass. There would be long faces in Leadenhall Street and even in Threadneedle Street at the news that a powerful American squadron was scouring the coast. The Admiralty would be at its wits’ end to find the necessary ships-of-the-line and accompanying frigates—at the expense of the blockade of the French coast—to form the squadrons to chase him away again, and the possibility of his return would complicate future arrangements for weeks to come.

Rodgers made no attempt to profit by the opportunity he had made for himself. He turned away, heading south for Madeira—still in thick weather—before turning eastward for home. In his reports he made such small attempt to explain why he did not linger in the mouth of the Channel that it seems he attributed no importance to the possibility; he certainly put forward no excuse and deemed no excuse necessary, and it is odd that a sailor of Rodgers’s calibre, who had given much thought to professional problems, should not have devoted a few lines in his reports to discussion of this course of action.

It is likely—and the whole tenor of Rodgers’s report is in accordance with the theory—that having set out from New York in pursuit of one particular convoy, and having for three weeks urged his course with that objective in mind, Rodgers was so disappointed at the thought of having missed his quarry and so exasperated at the continuance of thick weather which had hampered him that he gave no thought at all to any alternative activity. He had been three weeks without news from America, and he could anticipate that it would be longer still before his return would enable him to hear any. He had left behind him a powerful British force based within striking distance of the American coast, and he must have been consumed with anxiety about what had been happening there. He had made his sortie in the hope of facilitating the return of American shipping, and in the conviction that this was the best course; but in three dreary weeks at sea the conviction could weaken. If he returned at once he would still have been absent for two months or so; that was time enough for American shipping to reach home, and in the presence of the enemy he could find fresh employment for his force. By the time of his return the drinking-water of his squadron would be seriously depleted—although that difficulty would not be acute—and he could see no opportunity for replenishment. One way and another there were arguments in favour of recrossing the Atlantic, and Rodgers acted upon them.

His southward sweep to Madeira opened up the possibility of capturing valuable East Indiamen, but the faint possibility did not materialize. In his whole voyage Rogers captured no more than seven small merchantmen. He skirted the Nova Scotian coast to make what observations he could of hostile activities, and with sound judgment he selected Boston as the port to which he should return, and there he dropped anchor after seventy days at sea. Ten weeks without news, having left his country at the moment of coming to grips with a powerful and enterprising enemy, Rodgers’s anxiety as he approached must have been intense. He found a city which the day before had been raised from the depths of depression to the heights of exultation.