American privateering in 1812 was even bolder and more successful than during the Revolution.It was the work of a race of merchant seamen who had found themselves, who were in the forefront of the world's trade and commerce, and who were equipped to challenge the enemy's pretensions to supremacy afloat.Once more there was a mere shadow of a navy to protect them, but they had learned to trust their own resources.They would send to sea fewer of the small craft, slow and poorly armed, and likely to meet disaster.
They were capable of manning what was, in fact, a private navy comprised of fast and formidable cruisers.The intervening generation had advanced the art of building and handling ships beyond all rivalry, and England grudgingly acknowledged their ability.The year of 1812 was indeed but a little distance from the resplendent modern era of the Atlantic packet and the Cape Horn clipper.
Already these Yankee deep-water ships could be recognized afar by their lofty spars and snowy clouds of cotton duck beneath which the slender hull was a thin black line.Far up to the gleaming royals they carried sail in winds so strong that the lumbering English East Indiamen were hove to or snugged down to reefed topsails.It was not recklessness but better seamanship.The deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this assertion to the hilt.Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred prizes taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty million dollars in ships and cargoes.There were, all told, more than five hundred of them in commission, but New England no longer monopolized this dashing trade.Instead of Salem it was Baltimore that furnished the largest fleet- fifty-eight vessels, many of them the fast ships and schooners which were to make the port famous as the home of the Baltimore clipper model.All down the coast, out of Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, sallied the privateers to show that theirs was, in truth, a seafaring nation ardently united in a common cause.
Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their voices in protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly romped to and fro in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting a blockade of their own until London was paying the famine price of fifty-eight dollars a barrel for flour, and it was publicly declared mortifying and distressing that "a horde of American cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and unmolested, to take, burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and almost in sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the Chasseur of Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation of a blockade of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he requested should be posted in Lloyd's Coffee House.
A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain Boyle, with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the enemy's coast and to make sport of the frigates which tried to catch him.His Chasseur was considered one of the ablest privateers of the war and the most beautiful vessel ever seen in Baltimore.A fleet and graceful schooner with a magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders and carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never outsailed in fair winds or foul."Out of sheer wantonness," said an admirer, "she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of far superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom.
During his first cruise in the Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured eighteen valuable merchantmen.It was such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning Chronicle" of London to splutter "that the whole coast of Ireland from Wexford round by Cape Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally intolerable and disgraceful."This was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's cutter Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches;when the Governor Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the English Channel in quick succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore cruised for three months off the Irish and English coasts and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned to Boston filled with spoils, including a half million dollars of money; when the Prince de Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish Channel and made coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of Philadelphia cruised for six months in those same waters.
Two of the privateers mentioned were first-class fighting ships whose engagements were as notable, in their way, as those of the American frigates which made the war as illustrious by sea as it was ignominious by land.While off Havana in 1815, Captain Boyle met the schooner St.Lawrence of the British Navy, a fair match in men and guns.The Chasseur could easily have run away but stood up to it and shot the enemy to pieces in fifteen minutes.
