Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (79 page)

A bit of a troublemaker (he has already fought one duel, will fight more), he has piqued Perry’s right-hand man, Daniel Dobbins, by sneering at his choice of the sheltered harbour of Presque Isle as a shipyard. A shallow sandbar blocks the entrance; Elliott, who has
never visited Lake Erie, claims that Perry’s big ships cannot get across it. He much prefers his own choice of Black Rock, in spite of the fact that the harbour there is a
cul de sac
, within easy range of British guns at Fort Erie and within striking distance of the British army.

Fortunately, the British have been forced, briefly, to abandon Fort Erie in their scramble up the peninsula. Perry takes advantage of their absence to manoeuvre the five vessels out of their potential trap and, under cover of fog, up the Niagara River into Lake Erie.

The two young naval officers, who as a result of this summer’s events will be pitted against each other in bitter controversy, are a study in contrasts. Both are brave men who joined the navy in their teens as midshipmen and fought the Barbary pirates in the Tripolitan wars at the start of the century. There the similarities end. Elliott comes from a long line of black Donegal Irishmen; his kinsman and enemy is that same Matthew Elliott of the British Indian Department who is Tecumseh’s friend, Harrison’s
bete noire
. Fatherless since the age of nine (the elder Elliott having been slain by Indians), he is hot tempered, brooding, quick to take offence at any imagined slight.

Perry’s people are Quakers, his father a retired naval captain. He comes from a family of eight—a brother, Matthew, will one day gain fame by opening Japan to the West. Like Elliott, he has a quick temper but has learned to keep it under control. Most of his colleagues find him quiet, unemotional, sedate, courteous, a little humourless. Dr. Usher Parsons, his surgeon, finds him to be the most remarkable officer he has known for impressing his subordinates with almost reverential awe, inculcating in them a dread of giving their commander offence. He is well read, plays the flute, is a capable fencer, a student of both history and drama, and a fearless and elegant horseman.

He is also a man of considerable moral rectitude. He disdains to indulge in naval profanity and, although it is customary to allow any fleet commander a percentage of construction costs, Perry has refused to take a penny, in sharp contrast to his superior, Chauncey, who is reaping a fortune at Sackets Harbor. “It might influence
my judgement,” says Perry, “and cause people to question my good faith.”

Action on Lake Erie, Summer, 1813

Does this paragon have no chinks in his armour? There is one reassuring imperfection. It is said that Perry, who does not give a hang for musket ball or grape-shot, has an almost pathological fear of cows, will trudge through mud to avoid one if he hears so much as a moo. That, and a tendency to succumb to fever after periods of strain, appear to be his only frailties.

The wind, which has bedevilled Perry with its moodiness for the past week, now drops, and the squadron is forced to return to its anchorage at Buffalo. The following morning it sets off again, crawling along the shoreline, sails drooping in a wan breeze. In the first twenty-four hours it moves no more than twenty-five miles.

That night Perry anchors close to shore to escape detection. A man signals from the bank and comes aboard to warn that the British flotilla of five boats, led by the flagship
Queen Charlotte
, has appeared off Presque Isle. Sick or not, Perry is out of his bunk and on deck, ready to do battle. But when, on June 19, he reaches his destination he learns that the British, having finished their reconnaissance, have departed. It is one of the strokes of good fortune that seem to attend Perry’s career. The British clearly outgun him, even without their biggest ship,
Detroit
, unfinished at Amherstburg. The
fleets will not be equal until Perry completes his two brigs,
Lawrence
and
Niagara
, still under construction here at Presque Isle Bay.

This is the best natural harbour on Lake Erie, a placid sheet of water, three miles long and more than a mile wide, protected from Erie’s storms by a six-mile finger of land that curls around the outer edge. A sandbar, six feet below the surface, joins the peninsula to the far shore, effectively barring the harbour from enemy incursion. The advantage is two-edged. Jesse Elliott is not the only one who is convinced that the big brigs under construction will draw too much water to cross the bar, especially with the British fleet lurking just outside.

Now, as the pilots manoeuvre the five light vessels through the narrow channel that splits the sandbar, Perry’s men can see the village of Erie crowded along the shoreline—some fifty frame houses, a blacksmith shop, tannery, and court house, the last serving as a sail loft.

The shipbuilders have been here most of the winter, Perry since March. As a result of this season’s labours, three of his staff will go into the history books: Noah Brown, his building superintendent, a carpenter since the age of fifteen and the owner of the most flourishing shipyard in New York; Henry Eckford, his architect and designer, a Scottish-born genius, whose own shipyard is next door to Brown’s; and the indispensable Daniel Dobbins, organizer and troubleshooter, a seasoned lake captain whose home is here in Erie. Dobbins has seen more of the war than his colleagues, for he was captured by the British in the summer of 1812 and escaped to bring to Washington the early news of Detroit’s surrender.

These are young, energetic men—average age, thirty-five. They need to be, for the problems of building sophisticated fighting vessels hundreds of miles from the centre of civilization seem almost insurmountable. Presque Isle’s sole resource is timber. Everything else must be hauled in by keel boat and then ox cart, over roads that are no more than tracks wriggling through the forests, punctuated by mudholes, blocked by stumps and deadfalls. Dobbins and Perry have had to travel to Meadville to scrape up steel to make axes. Iron
comes from Bellefonte, spike rods from Buffalo, cables and hawsers from Pittsburgh, canvas from Philadelphia. Oakum is non-existent; the gunboats and brigs are caulked with old rope. Dobbins has to plunder his old schooner
Salina
for scrap iron, rigging, and shot.

Presque Isle

Brown’s army of axemen, choppers, and sawyers have partially denuded the surrounding forest, working from dawn to dusk, hacking down cucumber, oak, poplar, and ash for ribs, white pine for decks and bulwarks, black oak for planking and frames, red cedar and walnut for stanchions. It is all handwork; there are no sawmills within easy reach of the shipyard. So swift has the race been that a tree on the outskirts of the settlement can be growing one day and part of a ship the next.

Eckford, who outfitted all five of the vessels brought from Black Rock, has also designed four of the six being built at Presque Isle, including the two great brigs. Since no conventional craft of those sizes could get across the sandbar blocking the harbour’s mouth, Eckford has had to design fighting vessels with extremely shallow drafts.

It is trying work. Unavoidable food shortages have caused more than one strike. Delays have been maddening. Anchors ordered for May 1 have not yet arrived. Yet, in spite of it all, the ships are in the water, nearing completion. Perry confidently expects that his fleet of eleven vessels will be ready by mid-July. He has, however, two problems: he does not have enough seamen to man them, and
he still faces the difficult task of getting his biggest ships across the sandbar, beyond which the British are again lurking, ready to tear them to pieces before they can make sail.

SANDWICH, UPPER CANADA, JULY 4, 1813

Major-General Henry Procter, commander of the British Right Division, has never felt so frustrated. On this Independence Day, as his enemies fire rockets into the sky and sound church bells in celebration of their original victory over his countrymen, he vents his spleen in a brace of letters, one to Captain Robert McDouall, General Vincent’s aide-de-camp at Burlington Heights, the other—couched in more temperate language—to Sir George Prevost, the Governor General of Canada.

Procter feels abandoned. His naval colleague, the one-armed Captain Robert Heriot Barclay, newly in command on Lake Erie, has returned from his reconnaissance of Presque Isle full of gloom. The new American brigs are already in the water while the British ship
Detroit
is still on the ways at Amherstburg. Procter knows what he should do: he should attack Erie at once and destroy Perry’s fleet before it can be fitted; but he has neither men nor supplies for that task.

He is especially piqued at De Rottenburg, Sheaffe’s replacement as commander of the forces in Upper Canada. Prevost has promised to dispatch the remainder of the first battalion of the 41st to Fort Amherstburg, but De Rottenburg, faced with the need to invest Fort George, has been dragging his feet. Procter does not believe that the commanding general has any intention of sending him a single man. He is short of gunners, clerks, servants, artificers, as well as fighting men. He is also short of food for his men and of money to pay them. Things are so bad that “we have scarcely the Means of constructing even a Blockhouse.”

Captain Barclay is equally desperate for seamen. He has arrived with the merest handful, most of them incompetent, only a few able to speak English. He needs three hundred trained sailors and
marines to man his fleet, but Sir James Lucas Yeo, his superior at Kingston, will not even send him a shipwright. A super-cautious commander, Yeo wants to hold on to every man and scrap of material to meet the threat of Chauncey’s fleet on Lake Ontario.

It must be obvious to Procter that Prevost, De Rottenburg, and Yeo consider Lake Erie expendable. Indeed, it has been British strategy since the start of the war to defend Montreal and Quebec at any cost, even if it means abandoning Upper Canada. Now, with the Americans threatening the Niagara peninsula and Chauncey’s fleet menacing the St. Lawrence lifeline, Procter’s superiors are more reluctant than ever to weaken their own thin forces at Kingston and Burlington Heights. De Rottenburg says as much, bluntly, to Procter: he “must first secure Command of the lower Lake; after which there will be no Difficulty in recovering the Command of the Upper one.”

Procter disagrees. On July 11, he ruefully writes to Prevost to point out that had he received the promised men and supplies, he could probably have destroyed all of Perry’s vessels at Presque Isle, thus securing command of the lake and making a powerful diversion in favour of General Vincent’s embattled Centre Division.

Across the water, Perry’s fleet is rapidly approaching fighting trim. Barclay’s new ship,
Detroit
, along with two gunboats under construction at Amherstburg, will even the odds on Lake Erie, but
Detroit
will not be launched until July 20, let alone rigged. Perry’s shipbuilding problems are minor compared with those of the British. Canada has no steel or iron mills, no Pittsburghs or Philadelphias, no manufacturing worthy of the name. Everything but timber-nails, bolts, pulleys, lead, copper, glass, paint, resin, cordage, sails—must come from caches in Montreal and Quebec and ultimately from England. Cannon intended for Barclay’s ship have been expropriated by Yeo at Kingston; new ones must be ordered and shipped across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence, across Lake Ontario (where Chauncey’s fleet lies waiting) and, with the Niagara peninsula in flames, by a long land route through the forests of Upper Canada to Amherstburg.

Now the significance of the American attack on York comes into focus. It was, Chauncey said at the time, a blow from which the British could not recover. Certainly the loss of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stores—guns, ammunition, cables, cordage, canvas, tools, all destined for Barclay’s fleet—is making itself felt. Prevost’s only solution, which is no solution at all, is to urge Procter to make up his deficiencies by seizing guns and stores from the enemy “whose resources on Lake Erie must become yours.” But Procter does not believe his force strong enough to attack Presque Isle with its blockhouses and redoubts.