The U.S. brig Vixen, 12, Lieutenant George U. Read, had been cruising off the southern coast; on Nov. 22d she fell in with the Southampton, 32, Captain Sir James Lucas Yeo, and was captured after a short but severe trial of speed. Both vessels were wrecked soon afterward.
The Essex, 32, Captain David Porter, left the Delaware on Oct. 28th, two days after Commodore Bainbridge had left Boston. She expected to make a very long cruise and so carried with her an unusual quantity of stores and sixty more men than ordinarily, so that her muster-roll contained 319 names. Being deep in the water she reached San Jago after Bainbridge had left. Nothing was met with until after the Essex had crossed the equator in longitude 30° W. on Dec. 11th. On the afternoon of the next day a sail was made out to windward, and chased. At nine in the evening it was overtaken, and struck after receiving a volley of musketry which killed one man. The prize proved to be the British packet Nocton, of 10 guns and 31 men, with $55,000 in specie aboard. The latter was taken out, and the Nocton sent home with Lieutenant Finch and a prize crew of 17 men, but was recaptured by a British frigate.
The next appointed rendezvous was the Island of Fernando de Noronha, where Captain Porter found a letter from Commodore Bainbridge, informing him that the other vessels were off Cape Frio. Thither cruised Porter, but his compatriots had left. On the 29th he captured an English merchant vessel; and he was still cruising when the year closed.
The year 1812, on the ocean, ended as gloriously as it had begun. In four victorious fights the disparity in loss had been so great as to sink the disparity of force into insignificance. Our successes had been unaccompanied by any important reverse. Nor was it alone by the victories, but by the cruises, that the year was noteworthy. The Yankee men-of-war sailed almost in sight of the British coast and right in the tract of the merchant fleets and their armed protectors. Our vessels had shown themselves immensely superior to their foes.
The reason of these striking and unexpected successes was that our navy in 1812 was the exact reverse of what our navy is now, in 1882. I am not alluding to the personnel, which still remains excellent; but, whereas we now have a large number of worthless vessels, standing very low down in their respective classes, we then possessed a few vessels, each unsurpassed by any foreign ship of her class. To bring up our navy to the condition in which it stood in 1812 it would not be necessary (although in reality both very wise and in the end very economical) to spend any more money than at present; only instead of using it to patch up a hundred antiquated hulks, it should be employed in building half a dozen ships on the most effective model. If in 1812 our ships had borne the same relation to the British ships that they do now, not all the courage and skill of our sailors would have won us a single success. As it was, we could only cope with the lower rates, and had no vessels to oppose to the great "liners"; but to-day there is hardly any foreign ship, no matter how low its rate, that is not superior to the corresponding American ones. It is too much to hope that our political shortsightedness will ever enable us to have a navy that is first-class in point of size; but there certainly seems no reason why what ships we have should not be of the very best quality. The effect of a victory is two-fold, moral and material. Had we been as roughly handled on water as we were on land during the first year of the war, such a succession of disasters would have had a most demoralizing effect on the nation at large. As it was, our victorious seafights, while they did not inflict any material damage upon the colossal sea-might of England, had the most important results in the feelings they produced at home and even abroad. Of course they were magnified absurdly by most of our writers at the time; but they do not need to be magnified, for as they are any American can look back upon them with the keenest national pride. For a hundred and thirty years England had had no equal on the sea; and now she suddenly found one in the untried navy of an almost unknown power.
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Chapter IV.
On the Lakes (1812)
PRELIMINARY.—The combatants starting nearly on an equality—Difficulties of creating a naval force—Difficulty of comparing the force of the rival squadrons—Meagreness of the published accounts—Unreliability of James—ONTARIO—Extraordinary nature of the American squadron—Canadian squadron forming only a kind of water militia—Sackett's Harbor feebly attacked by Commodore Earle—Commodore Chauncy bombards York—ERIE—Lieutenant Elliott captures the Detroit and Caledonia—Unsuccessful expedition of Lieutenant Angus.
At the time we are treating of, the State of Maine was so sparsely settled, and covered with such a dense growth of forest, that it was practically impossible for either of the contending parties to advance an army through its territory. A continuation of the same wooded and mountainous district protected the northern parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, while in New York the Adirondack region was an impenetrable wilderness. It thus came about that the northern boundary was formed, for military purposes, by Lake Huron, Lake Erie, the Niagara, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence, and, after an interval, by Lake Champlain. The road into the States by the latter ran close along shore, and without a naval force the invader would be wholly unable to protect his flanks, and would probably have his communications cut. This lake, however, was almost wholly within the United States, and did not become of importance till toward the end of the war. Upon it were two American gun-boats, regularly officered and manned, and for such smooth water sufficiently effective vessels.
What was at that time the western part of the northern frontier became the main theatre of military operations, and as it presented largely a water front, a naval force was an indispensable adjunct, the command of the lakes being of the utmost importance. As these lakes were fitted for the manoeuvring of ships of the largest size, the operations upon them were of the same nature as those on the ocean, and properly belong to naval and not to military history. But while on the ocean America started with too few ships to enable her really to do any serious harm to her antagonist, on the inland waters the two sides began very nearly on an equality. The chief regular forces either belligerent possessed were on Lake Ontario. Here the United States had a man-of-war brig, the Oneida, of 240 tons, carrying 16 24-pound carronades, manned by experienced seamen, and commanded by Lieutenant M. T. Woolsey. Great Britain possessed the Royal George, 22, Prince Regent, 16, Earl of Moira, 14, Gloucester, 10, Seneca, 8, and Simco, 8, all under the command of a Commodore Earle; but though this force was so much the more powerful it was very inefficient, not being considered as belonging to the regular navy, the sailors being undisciplined, and the officers totally without experience, never having been really trained in the British service. From these causes it resulted that the struggle on the lakes was to be a work as much of creating as of using a navy. On the seaboard success came to those who made best use of the ships that had already been built; on the lakes the real contest lay in the building. And building an inland navy was no easy task. The country around the lakes, especially on the south side, was still very sparsely settled, and all the American naval supplies had to be brought from the seaboard cities through the valley of the Mohawk. There was no canal or other means of communication, except very poor roads intermittently relieved by transportation on the Mohawk and on Oneida Lake, when they were navigable. Supplies were thus brought up at an enormous cost, with tedious delays and great difficulty; and bad weather put a stop to all travel. Very little indeed, beyond timber, could be procured at the stations on the lakes. Still a few scattered villages and small towns had grown up on the shores, whose inhabitants were largely engaged in the carrying trade. The vessels used for the purpose were generally small sloops or schooners, swift and fairly good sailors, but very shallow and not fitted for rough weather. The frontiersmen themselves, whether Canadian or American, were bold, hardy seamen, and when