In the wake of the eighteentwelvers; fights & flights of frigates & fore-'n'-afters in the war of 1812-1815 on the Great Lakes

Front matter

IE WAKE OF THE

IN TWELVERS

N1DER '^

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

i. AN ANCHOR IN A GRAVE YARD

THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM OF A TRADING SKIPPER AS THE CENTURY CLOCK WAS STRIKING I

II

HOW THE ROYAL GEORGE WAS CHASED BY THE WATER-SPIDERS, AND THE SIMCOE RAN THE GAUNTLET, AND A DEAD HERO'S NAME PROVED A PASSPORT FOR HIS SWORD

WITH pipes aglow and hair still sleek from the evening wash-up the Albacore's crowd, lookouts and " watch-below " alike, were all clustered on the forecastle-head.

It was that good time in every lake schooner — the second dog-watch in fine weather, the last half hour of summer sunlight, before " eight bells " ushers in the first night-watch. Tis a time to " loaf and invite one's soul." The boys in the Albacore knew how to do that. In fact, the skipper said they all classed Ai at Lloyds in that regard. Just now, in the sweet, final flame of the level sun, they grouped like neophytes around Malachi Malone, their high priest of the tale that is told.

Malachi on the city street looked a disreputable old wreck ; but here, in his proper setting, he looked what he often said he was — the last man alive who'd choked on powder smoke in the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes.

It was not necessary to urge Malachi to yarn. He'd do it if he so willed, were he alone at the wheel in a gale of wind. If he wouldn't, he wouldn't, and coaxing availed not. This evening his messmates had seen the old signal light aglow under the white thatching of his solitary eyebrow, and settled themselves comfortably, on paul-posts and windlass-bitt, to listen.

Malachi had either been through the experiences he related, or he was a good reader of history and a good ' rememberer." In any event, he never fell into the pitfall of less expert yarn spinners, telling differing stories of the same thing. He made no secret of the fact that he had, as he called it, " some education." His speech was homely and he was careless about using a singular verb for a plural subject. But he seldom forgot his final g's in his participles, which, after all, is a fair indication that he had attended other schools than the rude one of fresh water forecastles.

Not good to look upon was Malachi. He might almost have been called monstrous. A long, lean frame of a man, with shoulders that would have been broad if they had not been so high, and back that once had been mighty but was bent in an ungainly hump. He was very, very old. His grey beard, grown only on his chin, left the wide upper lip and high cheekbones fiercely prominent. His one good eye seemed enormous. The socket of the other was a puckered red scar. His nose was battered, and the lower half of his right ear was missing. His appearance repulsed yet fascinated, as a finger cut, or a catfish, frightens and fascinates children.

To those who knew him his deformities and uglinesses seemed a necessary and not inharmonious part of the whole, like the gargoyles of a venerable cathedral. Forecastle tradition told of the half century in which he had been the terror of every ship's company and sailors' tavern, from Dickenson's Landing to Skillagalee, the wildest drinker and fiercest fighter of all the hard-working, hardfighting, hard-drinking crews of the carrying trade in the days when sail was supreme on the Great Lakes.

It was to waterfront brawls that his mutilations were credited. He would never tell of them, having pasted down those pages of his life-book. But of earlier days, as powder boy in the fighting fleets of 1812, he was fond of yarning in his Leisure time. This was usually ample, for the old man's strength was fading out with his century, and he got a place for his dunnage bag in the forecastle solely through his skill as a knotter and splicer and his knowledge of shoals and soundings.

That he was as old as his tales made out many doubted. He was age-worn, but his manner of speech was far from senile. Some suspected him of having made shipwreck of a career in some of the learned professions before going to sea ; but his reputation as a fighter, passed down from a previous generation of lake sailors, protected him from the inquisitive in his declining years, and he was usually welcome to spin his yam without interruptions other than those which indicated friendly interest.

This happened/' began the ancient Cyclops, ' when I was a kid playing hookey 'round the docks in Kingston, first year of the war. Kingston was quite a place in them days, the biggest in Upper Canada, with forts .Hid a garris< in and a navy yard.

' Queenston Heights was over. Everybody said the Yanks had got enough then to last them till the peace was declared. You their backs at the big oars. After them lumbered the brig Oneida, the flagship of Commodore Isaac Chauncey that year. The George stood in and anchored under the batteries, and the schooners hove to off Snake Island shoal outside the harbour and waited for their flagship.

" Farmers came swarming in with all their worldly goods in wains an' ox-carts. The Yanks had terrified 'em all along the Quinte shore. Thev had landed at Ernestown. Their biggest schooner, the Hamilton — the one that drowned all hands next year off Niagara — she hung behind while the others chased the George. She caught a harmless little trading schooner at the Ernestown wharf, stripped her of her sails and gear, and set fire to her. Poor old Cap'n Conn, he stood there on the shore, wringing his hands, while all he owned went up in smoke. War's no picnic for the losers, believe me, boys.

" On in the afternoon the Yankee fleet off the Snake hoisted brand new battleflags at every masthead and closed in. The Oneida had a battery of sixteen twenty-fourpounders, guns as heavy as the George s, and almost as many. She was backed by the gun-schooners Chauncey made famous — little water-waggons, each top-heavy with a long

-i thirty-two-pounder amidships and smaller guns at the sides. They was no good in a seaway, but wicked at long range in smooth water. They lay just beyond reach of the George s carronades and pelted her with roundshot till the blood ran from her scuppers. Four times soldiers from the fort was sent out to reinforce the spent gun-crews, and all the time the George s shot was just making holes in the air and water. Some fetched the Oneida, for she had to close in, but the schooners went scot-free, all but one. This was the little Pert. Her gun burst at the third shot, and the George got in a few good ones at her before she hauled off ; but in the end they had to slip the George's cable and warp her in to the Garrison pier, where the Yanks could only get her by boarding.

" It looked as though they'd try that, for by this time they'd been reinforced by their schooner Governor Tompkins, which had spent the day running down a Kingston-bound Niagara vessel, the Mary Hall. But as the sun sank it began to breeze up hard from the sou'-west, right into the mouth of the harbour. If we could 'a just winged one vessel then she'd 'a been ours, for the wind would 'a driven her right ashore once she was crippled. Chauncey was a wise old bird. He knew the

Oneida sailed sideways like a crab, going to wind'ard, and some of the others wasn't much better ; so he hauled off while there was time, and thrashed up to the lee of Four-Mile Point, away across the harbour, and came to an' anchor there.

" Boys, it was a great sight to see that fleet, black-winged like bats against the red-striped western sky, beating across that stretch o' snapping whitecaps to the lee of the point. On the way the Pert lost her commander. Arundel was his name. Poor chap, he had his ribs caved in with a piece of the breechblock, when her gun burst. He wouldn't go below, and after waiting two hours on deck, through the bombardment, he tried to sail her up to her moorings. He was propped against the taffrail, and the mainsheet caught him when she went in stays and whisked him overboard. Years and years afterwards I heard that, from the man who was at the Pert's wheel "

" Eight bells ! ' came the call from the quarter deck. " Eight bells ! ' echoed the forecastle-head. " Eight bells ! ' repeated the skipper. " Call the watch and set the sidelights ! Wheel-relief ! Malachi, it's your trick ! " And so the yam snapped in the middle.

I

" By-the-wind," rumbled the shell-back whose trick was up.

" By-the-wind," repeated Malachi Malone, after the immemorial shipboard custom, as he took his place on the wheel-grating. The course is ever given and accepted thus when steersmen change.

This was one of the times when nothing but lightning could have permanently interrupted Malachi Malone, and he took up his parable of 1812 just where he had left off. His watch sidled as far aft as they dared, and the good-natured skipper, knowing a yarn was toward, raised no objections to the intrusion on the sacred quarter deck. They're not so brass-bound on fresh water as they are on salt.

" There was no sleep for anybody in Kingston, that night of the ninth of November," Malachi went on, speaking principally to the binnacle. " Watchfires roared along the water-front in the gale that blew, and men, women and children huddled around them and stared at the tossing anchor-lights of the Yankee fleet, far across the wind-whipped water. The word was passed that the town would be sacked by morning light ; but old sailors said Chauncey'd never come any closer'n Four-Mile Point while the wind held from the west'ard, and they was right.

" Daylight showed the Yankee fleet thrashing out for the open. Lake Ontario was running like a raging river, in grey-green combers. Their fluffy white tops blew off in smoke as they rose. Chauncey crowded every stitch on to his slab-sided old brig, and back an' forth, back an' forth across the narrow channel she sidled. She buried her lee-deck till her gun-muzzles was in the water, and hove up her weather side till we could almost see her grass-grown keel. She gained but a few fathoms every time she made a tack. But he thrashed her out, and his schooners followed him, threatening to roll their guns overboard or down the hatches all the while. The Mary Hall, the prize they'd taken, couldn't beat out. So they squared her away before the wind, with one of their schooners, the Growler, for company, and ran down past Kingston Harbour, and anchored under the lee of Long Island. The game was to coax the Royal George from the shelter of the batteries, in an attempt to recapture the prize. But the George had all hands busy driving shot-plugs and tricing boarding-nettings masthead high, and wasn't to be lured to leeward of the shore guns for all the flour-laden Mary Halls that ever floated.

" Then out past the foot of Amherst

Island, up to the west'ard of the harbour, poked another set of heads'ls. It was the little schooner Simcoe, running for shelter from the westerly gale, inward bound from York, and knowing nothing o' what waited her. Old Jim Richardson sailed her, father o' the Richardson as was in the Moira, and lost an arm at Oswego, and wound up as a Methody bishop afore he died. When the Simcoe saw the American fleet thrashing out she hauled her wind and tried to shoot in over Amherst Bar, but three of Chauncey's schooners, the Julia, the Tompkins, and the Hamilton, fore-reached on her and cut her off ; so Richardson squared her away before the wind and drove straight for Seven Acre Shoal, that lay 'twixt him and Kingston Harbour. 'Tween the puffs of smoke from the Yankee guns we could see the leadsmen in the forechains, and almost hear 'em singing out : ' By the deep nine ! By the mark five ! A quarter less four ! ' and so on as the water shoaled. It fell from fathoms to feet, and still Richardson drove on. The Hamilton, leading the chasers, smelt the bottom at nine foot depth, and put her helm down ; so did the others, glad of the chance to haul off with whole keels ; and as they tacked for the lake again they all together let drive a broadside that made the water boil around the flying Simcoe. She had just scraped clear o' the reef and was running wing-andwing for the anchorage. Everybody but old Richardson dived below when they saw the smoke of the broadside. He stuck to the wheel. But his crew popped up as fast as they'd ducked down, yelling, ' Captain, she's filling ! '

" Only the last one of the thirty-twopound shot had struck her, but it was at close range, and it went in through her starboard quarter and came out under her bows. She went down like a broken bottle. Old Richardson fired the only musket aboard at the Yanks, just as the water chased him from the deck to the rigging. She settled in four fathoms, with the crew at the crosstrees, and her red ensign flapping at the gaff-end above the whitecaps that snarled over the shoal. Boats from the garrison pulled out against the gale and picked the crew from off their perches, just as Chauncey's fleet tacked to the southward, and bore away for Sackett's Harbour."

And here Malachi unarched his huge back, as though shaking off the weight of his century, and lapsed into silence, his one eye concentrated upon the shivering tack of the mizzen

1 HE " SIMCOE " Rl NNIXC; I Ml- ..\l S i

•■ Richardson squared her away before the wind and drove .traighl foi Se> en-Ai re Sli lal.

gafftops'l, which, as everyone knows, proclaimed that the Albacore was getting a just and even " full-and-by," no more and no less.

But the mood of utterance was on Malachi. He whirled the wheelspokes unnecessarily, cleared his throat once or twice, and finally broke forth :

" Everybody's got a good streak in him, some'eres. Even Isaac Chauncey had his."

" Him as was the American commodore on Lake Ontario ? " queried Pan-faced Harry artfully, as though Malachi had not been talking about the very man for the last hour.

" Young feller," answered Malachi impressively. " There never was more'n one Isaac Chauncey. That was him."

Brutus-like he paused for a reply. None was forthcoming. The oracle proceeded :

" When Chauncey sunk the Simcoe in Kingston Harbour and sailed off to the south'ard in the November gale, it wasn't the loss of the vessel that worried old Jim Richardson. She was sheltered some by the reef she'd crossed before the Yanks plugged her, and could be raised. Matter o' fact, she was raised and sailed for years afterwards. But when the garrison boats picked up the old man and his crew from the crosstrees o'

the sunken packet his first word was : ' Where's the Moira ? '

" The Earl of Moira was a fourteen-gun brig that his son, young Jim Richardson, sailed in. Young Jim was a provincial lieutenant, but that only gave him rank as sailing master in the Royal Navy. He was a smart sailorman, and afterwards took to sky-piloting. The brig had sailed from York when the Simcoe did, but she was to stretch over to Niagara, and convoy a sloop from there to the St. Lawrence.

" That sloop was only a squat little trader, boys, but she had a cargo money couldn't buy. Brave Sir Isaac Brock had been buried three weeks before in a bastion of Fort George. And that little sloop, sent across from York to Niagara, had aboard of her the dead general's sword, his plate, his books, his papers, his wardrobe, his arms — all the things his folk in the Channel Islands, across the salt water, would prize for remembrance. You've heard in school, you youngsters, that Brock's last words were, ' Push on, York Volunteers ! ' Right enough. He said that. And then he asked them that bent over him to send his sister— something. They couldn't catch just what. But them was his real last words. And this here sloop, that Richardson's son

3^ was helping convoy, had all of Brock's belongings aboard, bound for Montreal, for shipment home to Guernsey.

" We told old Richardson the Moira hadn't been sighted, nor the Commodore in the Prince Regent, neither. He said the Prince Regent was safe in York, at the dockyard. ' But I'd sooner the Yanks 'ud blow the Simcoe to staves,' the old chap added, ' than have 'em catch Jimmy; and I'd sooner have 'em catch Jimmy than touch one scrap o' the general's property. Who'll go with me to warn the Moira that Chauncey's off the harbour mouth?'

" It seemed a crazy thing to try, with a gale o' wind blowing from the west'ard and it spitting snow, and the Moira anywhere between Kingston Harbour and Burlington Bay. But he borrowed a fishboat and drummed up a crew. Nobody was very keen on going, except the old man and me. That was how I got the chance. I dasn't go back to school, for I'd been playing hookey ever since the Yankee fleet showed up off the harbour ; and I dasn't go heme, for I'd get a whaling there for not going to school. It cost a shilling a week to get schooling then, and my dad was a particular man about shillings.

" Anyhow, we started up the lake, in a

THE EIGHTEEN-TWELYERS

half-decked lugger, six of us, pulling her under oars against the headwind, and glad of the chance to keep warm that way. We followed the North Channel from Kingston, up among the islands of the Bay of Ouinte, and then pulled across to South Bay Point at the foot of Prince Edward County, by the False Ducks. Old Richardson figgered the Moira'd have to pass there on her way down the lake, and he planned to lie in the lee of the islands till she came by, and warn her to pop into the Bay of Ouinte. He was a good reckoner, was the old man. We reached the False Ducks by daylight, after forty miles of rowing and sailing — the wind had come fair — and we landed and thawed ourselves out by a driftwood fire, and cooked some grub. There was no wind all day, and the sky began to grease up, as it does ahead of a November snowfall. At sundown we sighted a pair of square tops'ls, and pulled towards 'em. It was the Moira. And she had the sloop in tow. She had been delayed coining down the lake, lagging for her convoy. They swung our fishboat in on the deck by the yardtackles, and Capt. Sampson, R.N., who commanded her, said old Richardson ought to have a medal, and he felt honoured at having the son of such a man for sailing master.

They let me swing a hammock that night in the Moira's fo'c'sle, and I wouldn't 'a changed places with King George.

" The wind came in from the east'ard. There was no light on the False Ducks in them days, and to clear the islands before stretching north into the bay the Moira had to stand out into the lake. It was dangerous, but it had to be done. It was morning afore we'd a safe offing, and then the wind fell light, and the snow set in, smothering down like a thick blanket.

' We lay rolling hour after hour, the empty sails slapping the masts, shaking down snowfalls at every lurch. Sometimes we could see the sloop astern, and sometimes we couldn't. With nothing else to do, the watch fell to guessing where she'd show up next. Sometimes she'd range up on one quarter, sometimes on the other, sometimes almost abeam of us. She was drifting around on her long towline, for neither vessel had much steerage way. She went out of sight in an extra thick smother, and next we heard her hail : ' Moira ahoy . Have you changed the course ? ' and a voice answered astern of her : ' What ship is that ? Stand by to fend off ! '

" Then the snow thinned a bit, and we saw the sloop, and right on top of her, blotting out her shape with a towering bulk of canvas and hull, another vessel — a brig — eight heavy guns grinning from either side, and the Stars and Stripes sway in' at the main-peak. The Moira was trapped. Not a gun of ours was manned. And not a gun of ours could bear on her without first blowing the convoysloop out of the water.

" Again came the hail, in a deep-sea bass. 1 What ship is that ? ' Captain Sampson sprang to our rail.

" ' His Britannic Majesty's brig-of-war Earl of Moira. Box } T our vessel off clear of that sloop, sir, and we'll fight it out with you — but for God's sake don't fire into that convoy ! '

" ' Why not ? ' bellowed the bass voice ' Mind your own funeral — we're double your weight.'

" ' The sloop,' answered Captain Sampson steadily, 'carries General Sir Isaac Brock's effects. Whoever you are. hold your broadside till we have both let her drop out of range !

" ' This is the United States brig of war Oneida,' the bass voice came back, as though nettled at having to introduce his vessel, ' flagship of Commodore Chauncey. The Commodore's compliments, and if you are convoying the effects of the late general, pass on. We'll meet again.'

Again, sir,' answered Captain Sampson, stiffly. The Stars and Stripes at the Oneida's gaff-end dipped vaguely in a friendly salute. Our ensign dipped in return, shaking down snowflakes as it fell and rose and fluttered out in the reviving breeze. The sloop sidled back astern, the towline tautened, and the tops 'Is of the Yankee flagship faded into the snow-mist and vanished."

'Well, "admitted Pan-faced Harry, who was a cautious critic of other men's actions, " that was rather white of Chauncey."

Ill

A DRAWN BATTLE ON LAKE ONTARIO IN 1813

"TIT THAT! You never heard tell of V/V/ ^ e Burlington races ! Then I suppose your education was also neglected in the matter of the Ontario Circuit, the Niagara Sweepstakes, and so on ? Salt my old bones, the upbringing of the young has been of a strange sort, in these days of turf-guides and form charts."

Like a Cyclops regarding the captives in his cavern, Malachi Malone glared from his bunkshelf in the schooner's forecastle upon the assembled " watch-below," sitting smoking and yarning on the chain-lockers.

" Fill away, Malachi, on the 1812 tack," Archie Nickerson, the second mate, fired back, folding up the sporting page of the daybefore-last's paper, from which the boys were trying to pick the Queen's Plate winner. And Malachi went on.

" Second year of the war I got a berth in the new ship, the Wolfe, as powder boy, with an extra shilling a week from the captain of the starboard quarter battery for keepin' his shot-tally for him, because I was handy with the pen. The Admiralty was just as strict with us on the lakes as they were on salt water, with fines for every commander who went beyond his skimp}- allowance of ammunition. That was why there was such wild shooting work in action sometimes. The crews never got a chance to exercise at the guns unless a foreign ensign made the target.

" I felt like a lord with my shilling a week for checking bar, chain and round shot, just because I was handy with a pen and could read without spelling every other word ; but the new commodore took the wind out of my sails in short order.

" Sir James Lucas Yeo, he was, and he had just come to the lakes after fairly setting the sea on fire with the privateer Confiance, which he had cut out from under the French guns at Muros Bay. He was a hummer. Why, the King of Portugal made him a knight for the capture i >f the town of Cayenne ! He was thirty when he reached the lakes, a long, thin, sulky-looking chap, with a chin as hard as the peak of the anchor, and eyes that spat black lightning. He was a hard fighter, and a hard driver, and a hard loser. He went black in the face every time things went wrong, and that first season he went black very often. That new flagship of his, the Wolfe, was chaos afloat when he took her over — fresh from the ways, rigged out by torchlight, armed in the dark, and manned haphazard by hayseeds. First he made her a floating hell, then a progressing purgatory, and, before long, a well-oiled fightingmachine ; but there was a lot of rawhide used in the process.

" Sir James fumed like a volcano, but took care the lava never scorched his own sides. He had the smaller fleet and fewer guns, and never once could old Chauncey nettle him into "

" Who was old Chauncey ? " piped up Bill Barrymore, the newly-shipped donkeyman, pulling off his last seaboot.

" Who was old Chauncey ? Who was George Washington ? " snorted Malachi in disgust at such ignorance, " Who "

" Don't cross his bows when he has the starboard tack, you engine driver," warned Nickerson, " or it'll be ' eight bells ' before Malachi gets under weigh again."

" Isaac Chauncey," rejoined Malachi deliberately, " was the American Commodore on the lakes. It's all right boys ; he was dead before you were born, so no wonder you don't mind him. He was a jolly old dog was Chauncey — broad in the beam, with a round red face that had seen lots of wind and weather, and never forgot to laugh. There was only one thing he liked better than fighting and that was telling about it.

" He had a queer fleet, had Chauncey. To start with, he had that old waggon the Oneida, a brig that crawled like a tortoise going free, and slid sideways like a crab when she tried to beat to wind'ard. But she had sixteen twenty-four-pounders, and that made her a tough nut to crack. She was better at fighting than running away — and that suited Melancthon T. Woolsey, of Sackett's Harbour, the lieutenant who commanded her, to a knockdown. Chauncey built a twenty-four-gun ship, the President Madison, in fifty-eight days from the day the timber was felled in the bush. Later on he built another line ship-rigged corvette, the General Pike, and a smart schooner called the Sylph. And he had a whole menagerie of little fore-'n'-afters of stone-hooker size — from a hundred tons down.

4^

" They were coasters, bought up when the war broke out, and loaded with deck- jags of cannon. They were slow as molasses and tippy as soda-water bottles. All they were good for was long range work in smooth water. Then they were terrors. The guns they carried were all long 'uns, twice as powerful as the carronades our fleet had, meant for nigh-hand broadside work.

" In light weather, at long range, those schooners lived up to their names — Scourge, Asp, Perl, Growler, and Conquest. In a sailing breeze they were as harmless as might be expected of Ontario, Julia, Hamilton, Fair American, Governor Tompkins, or Lady of the Lake. All told, Chauncey had fifteen vessels that summer.

" Yeo had only eight at the most. There was the Wolfe, not quite as big as either the Pike or the Madison ; and the Royal George, ship-rigged like the Wolfe, but smaller. Then there were the brigs — the old Earl of Moira, and the Lord Melville — about half the size of the two ships ; and the schooners, Sir Sidney Smith, Beresford, Simcoe, and Seneca — none of them much bigger than the larger Bay of Quinte traders to-day. The last two were kept for transport duty or harbour work. The squadron sailed in three pa : rs — two ships, two brigs, two schooners ; and they held together like a bunch of trained dogs — after Yeo had sent one or two crews ashore to dig trenches, for shortening sail before the flagship signalled.

" But Chauncey's bunch — Lord love you, the only way he had of keeping them together was roping them up. The smart ones in the fleet could sail circles around the droghers, and what was worse for him, they liked to do it. He'd write home how hard he wanted to fight, but he'd forget to add that he wanted to fight in smooth water at long range. He'd tow that slug the Oneida by the hour, and make the Madison and the Sylph tow the schooners, so that he would have all his guns for a battle — if he ever got one. And Sir James took good care that they never closed up until it was blowing a good hickory and there was a chance of our short guns and musketry sweeping the decks of the lowbulwarked, wallowing schooners. That was why we had what we called the ' Ontario Circuit.'