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The American conquest of the seas was a slow and unsteady process, with some odd twists along the way. One of the oddest occurred in 1813 when a representative of the United States tried to adopt into the “great American family” a South Seas island full of cannibals. The story of how this came about is well worth recounting in some detail, as it represents the pattern of many of America’s expeditions abroad in the nineteenth century.
The instigator of this colonial plot was Captain David Porter of the U.S. Navy, one of “Preble’s Boys,” a fine fighting officer whose audacity and independence sometimes bordered on foolhardiness. The son of a naval captain, he had gone to sea at 16 on a merchantman in 1796, joining the U.S. Navy two years later as a midshipman. He was serving under Captain Thomas Truxton on the Constellation when it captured the French frigate L’Insurgente during the quasi-war with France. Tradition has it that Midshipman Porter was one of only 13 Americans sent to take charge of the battered ship. For three white-knuckle days, this small prize crew had to steer L’Insurgente toward port while preventing a mutiny among 173 surly prisoners. As a reward for successfully completing this perilous assignment, Porter was promoted to lieutenant at 19.
He then shipped out as second-in-command of the Experiment, a shallow-draft schooner sent to cruise the Caribbean. On New Year’s Day of 1800, the Experiment was anchored off Haiti when it was attacked by hundreds of pirates in 10 barges. The unnerved skipper wanted to surrender. Porter, never one to fear a charge of insubordination, pushed him aside and directed a vigorous defense that wound up repelling the pirates’ attack.
In 1801 he joined the U.S. expedition against the Barbary States, where he covered himself with more glory, and was twice wounded, before languishing in Tripolitan captivity along with the rest of the Philadelphia’s crew. The officers, unlike the men, did not have to bust rocks, and he put his 18 months of enforced leisure to good use, furthering his education beyond the nautical areas in which he was already expert. After his return to America, Porter, by now a master-commandant, was given command of the naval station at New Orleans, where he took stern measures to stamp out the banditti of the sea who called the area home. Here he and his wife also adopted an eight-year-old boy named David Glasgow Farragut, whose mother had died.
In 1811 Porter received a captain’s commission and command of the 32-gun frigate Essex. When the United States declared war on Great Britain the following year because of British harassment of American trade and impressment of American seamen, Porter’s primary mission was commerce raiding. During his second cruise, which took him down to Brazil, he decided on his own initiative to swing around Cape Horn, the tip of South America, making his ship the first U.S. man-of-war to reach the Pacific Ocean. Around the Galapagos Islands he captured so many British whalers that he nearly wiped out Britain’s whaling industry in those waters. English critics had a field day denouncing Porter, who had once fought the Barbary pirates, for engaging in conduct that they saw as piratical.
By October 1813, the Essex had been long at sea and badly needed retrofitting. But Porter was afraid to put into any South American port for fear of being set upon by a British squadron. Lacking a U.S. base in the area, he decided to make the 2,500-mile journey from the Galapagos to the Marquesas, a chain of 14 volcanic islands 850 miles northeast of Tahiti. Here Porter hoped to find “some relaxation and amusement” for his men. He was to get more than he bargained for.
On October 25, 1813, the Essex weighed anchor at Nukahiva, an island of 131 square miles with the best harbor in the Marquesas chain, which Porter incongruously dubbed Massachusetts Bay. Here the Essex was joined by five of the ships that she had captured, including one christened Essex Junior. Herman Melville, who would enter the same horseshoe-shaped harbor three decades later, remarked that “it presented the appearance of a vast natural amphitheater in decay, and overgrown with vines, the deep glens that furrowed its sides appearing like enormous fissures caused by the ravages of time.” The bay was the entrance to a land of breadfruit and coconuts, sandalwood and palms—and tens of thousands of Polynesians split into numerous tribes and clans living in valleys separated by 3,000- to 5,000-foot mountain peaks.
MAP 2.1Philippines and the Pacific, circa 1900
The sailors, after so long at sea, devoured the nearly naked Marquesan women with their eyes. Melville would later marvel at “their extreme youth, the light clear brown of their complexions, their delicate features, and inexpressibly graceful figures, their softly moulded limbs”—and, perhaps most welcome of all, their complete lack of sexual inhibitions and venereal diseases. Before long the women swarmed all over the Essex and fell into the sailors’ arms. The copper-colored men were a less comforting sight, as they stood around the bay clutching massive war-clubs and spears. Wearing only loin clothes and capes made of bark, they sported tattoos from head to toe (including stripes on their faces), feathered headbands, tufts of hair tied around their waists, ankles, and loins, and whale teeth stuck in their earlobes. Porter was astonished to discover as well a rum-soaked, loin-clothed Englishman named Wilson who had been there “for many years” and “had become in every respect, except in colour, an Indian.” This expatriate assumed the indispensable role of interpreter.
Gattanewa, the septuagenarian chief of the Taaehs, the tribe controlling the harbor where the Essex alighted, took a boat out to the American ship. Porter escorted him around and fired a gun in hopes of impressing him, but Gattanewa, tipsy on an alcoholic drink derived from the kava root, only “complained that it hurt his ears.” Porter asked for permission to set up camp on the beach, and the chief agreed, but in return he demanded help in the Taaehs’ war against an inland tribe called the Happahs. Porter was trapped: He did not want to get into the middle of a tribal conflict, but he needed Gattanewa’s cooperation. What to do? He sent a message to the Happahs offering peace but threatening to make war if they continued to fight the Taaehs.
Not long after the Americans landed and set up camp on the beach, the situation spun out of control. The warlike Happahs renewed their attacks on the Taaehs, calling the Americans “cowards” and threatening to steal their sails. The natives were not impressed by test firings of the visitors’ bouhies (muskets), so Porter sent Lieutenant John Downes with 40 men and a six-pound cannon into the hills to convince the Happahs “of the folly of resisting our fire arms with slings and spears.” Downes’s contingent stumbled back later that day, “overcome with . . . fatigue.” The small American expedition had confronted some 3,000 to 4,000 Happahs entrenched in a mountain fortress. During the attack Downes was hit with a stone in the stomach and another man took a spear in the neck, but they did manage to take the redoubt, killing five Happahs in the process.
The Americans’ Taaeh allies clubbed to death the wounded Happahs, but did not eat them, much to the surprise of Porter, who had heard (correctly) that they were cannibals. They did, however, put their dead enemies’ bones to good use by converting them into necklaces and fan handles.
Over the next couple of days, the chiefs of the Happahs and most of the other island tribes arrived to sue for peace. The Americans now turned their attention to building a small village dubbed Madisonville, complete with a fort mounting four guns. When the Stars and Stripes was hoisted over Fort Madison on November 19, 1813, to the accompaniment of a 17-gun salute, Porter informed the natives that they had been admitted “into the great American family, whose pure republican policy approaches so near their own.” President James Madison was proclaimed to be their chief, and Britain their enemy. Having asserted a U.S. claim to the islands “founded on priority of discovery, conquest, and possession,” Porter buried a flowery proclamation to that effect for future European visitors to find. It was not entirely a romantic gesture. He hoped that the islands would provide a Pacific base of operations for the American navy—an aspiration that was decades ahead of its time.
Although there was work to do, the captain gave his men plenty of opportunity for recreation. There was much feasting, and not only on the abundant pork and breadfruit. “Virtue among them, in the light which we view it, was unknown,” Porter wrote of the islanders. “With the common sailors and their girls, all was helter skelter, and promiscuous intercourse, every girl the wife of every man in the mess, and frequently of every man in the ship.”
Soon there was more trouble in this Polynesian paradise. The Typees, a more distant tribe renowned for their ferocity (later made famous by Melville’s eponymous novel), declared war on the Americans’ new allies, the Happahs and Taaehs. The Typees mocked the Americans as “white lizards, mere dirt” and “the posteriors and privates of the Taaehs.” “Finding that it was absolutely necessary to bring the Typees to terms, or endanger our good understanding with the other tribes,” Porter organized an expedition to the Typee beaches. Some 35 Americans from the Essex Jr. landed along with 5,000 Happah and Taaeh warriors in war canoes. The landing was uncontested; their advance was not.
“We entered the bushes, and were at every instant assailed by spears and stones, which came from different parties of the enemy in ambuscade,” Porter wrote. “We could hear the snapping of the slings, the whistling of the stones, the spears came quivering by us, but we could not perceive from whom they came.” They kept advancing, meeting more and more resistance, until they found the way blocked by a forbidding Typee fortress with seven-foot walls. Porter was low on ammunition, his native allies deserted him, and four of his men were wounded, including Downes, whose leg was shattered by a stone. There was no choice but to retreat. “We returned to the beach much fatigued and harassed with marching and fighting,” Porter wrote, and then they sailed back to Madisonville.
When word spread that the white men had been bested in battle, the Happahs and Taaehs began to turn on their no-longer-invincible allies. Porter feared that his tiny settlement might be overrun and his men massacred. “I had now no alternative, but to prove our superiority by a successful attack upon the Typees,” the captain decided. Porter personally organized and led 200 of his men in an inland advance on the Typees’ valley designed to circumvent the fortifications that had foiled the first attack from the beach.
The Americans made a treacherous nighttime march to the top of a ridge above the Typee valley. Since his men were “much fatigued” and he did not want to chance a treacherous descent in the dark, Porter put off an attack until daylight. The sailors spent a miserable night on the mountain, drenched by a torrential rainfall and buffeted by shrieking winds. The next morning, the men found that their ammunition was damp, so the attack was delayed for another day. In the meantime, Porter ordered a musket volley fired as a warning to the Typees “to remove their women and children, their hogs, and most valuable effects.”
At dawn on November 30, 1813, the Americans, accompanied by Taaeh allies, made the almost vertical descent down a narrow path into the Typees’ valley, a placid enclave nine miles long and three miles across, dotted with coconut and breadfruit trees. Before long, “the spears and stones were flying from the bush in every direction.” The captain sent a message to the Typees that unless they ceased hostilities at once their villages would be burned. This message being ignored, the sailors marched the length of the valley, fighting every inch of the way, their progress marked by “a long line of smoking ruins.” By day’s end the battle was over. The Americans had won. Leaving behind “a scene of desolation and horror,” Porter and his men returned to Madisonville. Here they received Typee emissaries who came calling with countless hogs as a peace offering.
Porter claimed he took no joy in the blood his men had shed among a “happy and heroic people,” but he later reacted indignantly to the charge made in an English magazine that he was guilty of “wantonly murdering unoffending savages.” Replied the captain:
Many may censure my conduct as wanton and unjust. . . . But let such reflect a moment on our peculiar situation—a handful of men residing among numerous warlike tribes, liable every moment to be attacked by them and all cut off; our only hopes of safety was in convincing them of our great superiority over them, and from what we have already seen, we must either attack them or be attacked. . . . Wars are not always just, and are rarely free from excesses—my conscience acquits me of any injustice, and no excesses were committed, but what the Typees had it in their power to stop by ceasing hostilities.
It was not a justification likely to convince many Typees.
By December 9, 1813, the Essex had been retrofitted and stuffed with all the hogs, coconuts and bananas it could carry, and was ready to make sail. But the sailors were not happy about leaving their girlfriends behind. The captain put down an incipient mutiny by informing his crew that, should they resist orders, “I would without hesitation put a match to the magazine, and blow them all to eternity.” He never had to make good his bluff. After one troublemaker jumped ship, the remaining crew members subsided and the Essex sailed for South America on December 13. To hold the fort, they left behind Marine Lieutenant James Gamble, 2 midshipmen, 19 sailors, and 6 prisoners, including some British sailors from captured vessels. Also left behind were four captured British merchant ships.
All went well, more or less, until the following spring, when the British seamen mutinied. On May 7, 1814, the British mutineers took over the merchant ship Seringapatam. As they were sailing away, they wounded Lieutenant Gamble in the foot, and set him and four loyal men adrift in a small boat. At the same time the British beachcomber Wilson was stirring up the Taaehs by informing them that Opotee (Porter) was not coming back. On May 9, a 16-year-old midshipman and three sailors were set upon and butchered on the beach. Two other sailors were wounded in the attack but escaped. Gamble, already wounded in the foot and feverish, was left alone on the merchantman Sir Andrew Hammond when two boatloads of Taaehs in war canoes approached. Since all the guns were already loaded, he was able to hobble from one to the next, firing them as fast as possible, and forcing back the attack.
The next morning Gamble and the seven remaining Americans, most ill or wounded, piloted the leaky Hammond out to sea. Eventually they reached the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and were picked up by a British man-of-war and imprisoned. They finally reached New York in 1815.
Porter fared little better. In March 1814, the Essex was attacked by two British warships off Chile. Porter made a desperate fight of it and did not surrender until the decks ran red with blood, three-fifths of the crew being killed or wounded. He was held to have acquitted himself honorably and came home a hero. The Essex ended its days as a British prison hulk anchored off the Irish coast.
As for the Marquesas, the State Department simply ignored Porter’s attempt to annex them—not surprisingly, for the news of this first overseas conquest arrived while the British were burning Washington. In 1842, when France added the islands to her empire (wherein they remain today, as part of French Polynesia), Washington did not object. The U.S. would not have a Pacific island of its own until the acquisition of Midway twenty-five years later.
“Butcher and Bolt”
The Essex’s encounter with the tribes of Nukahiva makes a fitting start to a discussion of U.S. small wars in the nineteenth century. Indeed it would serve as a template for many of America’s encounters with the world: Yankees arrive with the best of intentions, but soon find themselves sucked into the vortex of war. During the nineteenth century this pattern would repeat itself, from the Falklands to Formosa, from Sumatra to Samoa, from China to Chile. After killing some natives, the Americans seldom stayed long; nor did they usually involve themselves much in local politics. What did they achieve? Sometimes a trade treaty; at other times, simply the satisfaction of having instilled fear of the Stars and Stripes.
The U.S. strategy, if that is the right word for such a haphazard enterprise, might best be characterized as “butcher and bolt”—a bit of slang popular in Britain’s Indian Army to describe punitive expeditions against troublemaking tribes, expeditions designed not to occupy territory but to “learn ’em a lesson.” Imperialistic officers such as David Porter might be eager to annex territory, but Washington was having none of it, at least not until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when America slowly gained an overseas empire, beginning with the peaceful acquisition of Alaska and Midway Island in 1867 (along with some scattered guano islands) and culminating in a bloody war in the Philippines in 1899. For most of the 1800s Americans’ land hunger was sated on the Western frontier.
But even if the U.S. eschewed overseas colonialism, that hardly means the country was isolationist, as the popular myth has it. Any nation that routinely sends warships thousands of miles from home is not exactly cut off from the world. Japan, which was truly isolationist until it was opened in 1854 by an American naval expedition, permitted hardly any contact at all between its citizens and foreign “barbarians.” Enterprising Yankee sea captains, by contrast, visited virtually every corner of the globe. And where commercial interests advanced, armed forces were seldom far behind. The flag usually follows trade, not the other way around.
Far from isolationist, American foreign policy in the nineteenth century can best be described as unilateralist, meaning that America usually acted without benefit of formal allies to defend its interests. An in-depth consideration of U.S. foreign policy lies outside the scope of this volume, but suffice it to say that America’s early foreign policy was shaped by Washington’s farewell address (“steer clear of permanent alliances”), Jefferson’s first inaugural address (no “entangling alliances”), and the Monroe Doctrine, a not-always-successful attempt to post a Keep Out sign on the Western Hemisphere. These traditions kept the U.S. from intervening militarily in Europe until 1917, but it was a different matter when it came to the rest of the world. Throughout the nineteenth century, American influence kept expanding abroad, especially in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Much of the growing American role overseas needed no guidance from Washington. It was a result of the restless Yankees’ inexorable progress across the North American continent and beyond, a process dubbed “manifest destiny” by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1839. Many of the obstacles in the path of American expansion were summarily knocked aside by military might. The army had the primary job of fighting the Indians, in wars that would drag on until 1890. The army, navy, and marines all pitched in to defeat Mexico in 1846–48 and Spain in 1898. America’s small wars abroad were mostly the province of the navy and Marine Corps, and since the marines remained a tiny force throughout the nineteenth century (fewer than 3,000 men until 1896, the Civil War years excepted), the central role in practice was assigned to the U.S. Navy.
The Naval Aristocracy
To understand how America became enmeshed in so many conflicts it helps to understand the era’s naval officers. Captain Thomas Truxton wrote that they must be “young men of principle, good education, high sense of honor, manly deportment, prudence, and of respectable connections.” Like their cousins in the Royal Navy, many of whose traditions they appropriated, they were largely recruited from the upper- and upper-middle classes (only about 1 percent rose from the ranks); usually lacked formal education, at least until the establishment of the Naval Academy in 1845; trained at sea from boyhood; sometimes acquired a fair amount of riches through prize money; and often married “well” (that is, to wealthy women). The navy inculcated in its officers such putatively un-American traits as obedience to orders and reverence for tradition, as well as more common Yankee virtues such as boldness and pluck. The results were not to the liking of some of their more egalitarian countrymen. Melville complained in the 1840s that “there still lingers on American men-of-war all the stilted etiquette and childish parade of the old-fashioned Spanish court of Madrid.”
The navy’s way of doing things created a starched, stiff-necked officer corps—imperious, hot-blooded, quick to take offense, and above all brave, sometimes suicidally so. Their ethos was perfectly exemplified by Admiral David Glasgow Farragut’s celebrated cry during the 1864 attack on Mobile Bay: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.” Officers seldom backed down from a challenge, whether from a brother officer (which would result in a duel) or from “natives” (which would result in a punitive expedition). Their code of conduct as an “officer and a gentleman” would not permit any less. This phrase, though still in use, has a musty ring to modern ears, since such rigid notions of manliness and honor have all but died out in the West, except, oddly enough, among young inner-city men who are liable to resort to violence if they feel “dissed.” In prior centuries this code of honor was universal among aristocrats, and American naval officers—dubbed a “naval aristocracy” by historian Peter Karsten—were no different.
The enlisted men of the navy, by contrast, were anything but aristocratic. They were closer to the “scum of the earth,” as Wellington affectionately described the British “common soldiers” who defeated Napoleon. Unlike the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy did not resort to impressment to man its ships. All its sailors were volunteers. Yet the pay and working conditions were hardly inviting to most landsmen. So who would sign up under those circumstances? The jack-tars were for the most part uneducated and impoverished, the dregs of the waterfront, many of them sailors who could not find civilian berths. More than half were foreign-born and most of those were not U.S. citizens. Roughly 14 to 18 percent were black freemen—a considerably higher proportion than in the country as a whole (2.5 percent).
One of the marines’ main jobs aboard ship was to protect “officer country” from the lower deck rabble; serving in landing parties was a secondary mission the marines acquired as the century progressed. Corporal punishment was a hallmark of shipboard life until flogging was finally outlawed in 1850, much to the regret of old sea dogs. The official grog ration was abolished in 1862, though wine was still allowed in the officers’ mess until 1914, but regardless of regulations, seamen (like soldiers) remained a hard-drinking lot. Gambling and whoring were other prime diversions for bluejackets.
To simplify somewhat, the nineteenth-century navy may be described as aristocratic officers spoiling for a fight, leading equally combative, often tipsy enlisted men who were on the fringes of society and, to get to the essence of the matter, would not be missed overmuch if a few died in action. Such men were constantly dispatched by the navy to the far corners of the globe to deal with chaotic situations in politically unstable lands populated by people with little understanding of Western notions such as private property and contracts. Far from home, with no way of communicating in less than a few months’ time with their superiors back in Washington, they had almost complete autonomy of action. Is it any wonder, then, that Americans became embroiled in so many small wars abroad? The only wonder, really, is that there were not more.
Pirates of the Caribbean
After the Barbary pirates had been stamped out, the navy next turned its attention to piracy closer to home. The West Indies had long been a haven of privateers and buccaneers stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Francis Drake, William Kidd, and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach had preyed on Spanish galleons. Attacks on American merchant ships in the region by French privateers had led to an undeclared war between the U.S. and France from 1798 to 1800. In the 1810s piracy again became a problem in the Caribbean, largely as a result of the revolutions against Spain that broke out in Latin America. The South American rebels gave letters of marque—legal authority for privateers—to all comers interested in intercepting Spanish shipping; many were little more than pirates and preyed on American merchantmen. Spain had little ability to protect U.S. ships—and little interest, either, since many American merchants were trading with breakaway republics that the Spanish navy was trying to blockade.
Thus pirates operated with virtual impunity in the countless coves of Puerto Rico and Cuba, both Spanish colonies. Their vessels ranged from rowboats to large sailing ships, some flying the famous Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones flag, others under a plain blood-red banner. “There is not a fisherman who is not a pirate, nor a canoe that is not a pirate vessel in miniature,” wrote Lieutenant Matthew C. Perry.
By one estimate, more than 3,000 acts of piracy were committed between 1815 and 1823 in the West Indies, an area that, after Britain, was America’s biggest trading partner. Many were quite bloody. The crew of one American merchant ship seized in the harbor of Matanzas, Cuba, suffered a particularly gruesome fate: The pirates “murdered all the crew of the brig, opened their entrails, hanged them by the ribs to the masts, and afterwards set fire to the vessel and all were consumed!” Such incidents so close to the United States led to soaring maritime insurance rates and pressure on Washington to respond.
In 1822, President James Monroe created the navy’s West India Squadron to work alongside the Royal Navy in suppressing piracy. Fourteen ships—ranging in size from the 36-gun frigates Congress and Macedonian to specially built 12-gun schooners and gunboats—with 1,300 sailors and marines were dispatched under the command of Captain James Biddle, a wealthy Philadelphian. The squadron, operating out of Thompson’s Island (now known as Key West), vigorously pursued and often fought pirate vessels.
It was difficult, dangerous work. The Shark, a schooner commanded by Matthew Perry, ran down one outlaw ship off the north coast of Cuba. The American man-of-war could not get close enough to shore to attack the pirates, so the bluejackets took to small boats to board the outlaw vessel. As the Americans grappled over the side with muskets, pikes, and knives, the pirates rushed forward to meet them and, in the words of a midshipman, “a desperate hand-to-hand combat ensued.” The deck rang with the clash of steel, an occasional gunshot, and the bestial grunts of men fighting for their lives. The pirates gradually gave way, with many jumping overboard to escape. The Americans pursued them relentlessly, killing some in the water. “In silence they sunk, their throats gurgling the water which was deeply crimsoned with the blood . . .” the midshipman reported. “But few escaped; and destroying what we could not preserve, we gathered our booty, and bore our prize away in triumph.”
It was not just pirates who were killed. On November 9, 1822, the Alligator, another schooner, discovered a cove in Cuba with five captured merchantmen, three pirate ships, and some 100 pirates. Lieutenant William H. Allen, the skipper, led 40 men in small boats to attack the cutthroats. In the ensuing melee, Allen took a musket ball in the chest. His death sparked widespread anger across the United States.
The West India Squadron’s most effective foe, however, turned out to be not a pirate’s sword but a mosquito’s bite. The link between these pesky insects and yellow fever and malaria was not discovered until the end of the century; until then, it was commonly believed that these tropical diseases were transmitted by night air, filth, and mysterious vapors. Given the primitive state of medicine, these epidemics had a devastating impact. Fully one-third of the 300-man crew of the Macedonian, Commodore Biddle’s flagship, was killed by “yellow jack” (yellow fever) during the oppressively hot summer of 1822. Biddle was forced to return north.
Chosen to replace him was David Porter, conqueror of the Marquesas, terror of British whalers, former prisoner of the Tripolitans. He was not an ideal choice for a job that would require some diplomatic finesse in dealing with the Spanish officials who ran Puerto Rico and Cuba. Tact had never been Porter’s strong suit. Once, when he was a young midshipman, a hard-drinking, foul-tempered lieutenant bawled him out for some petty infraction, and then slapped him to drive the point home. Porter responded by knocking down his senior with one punch. A few years later, a Baltimore tavernkeeper with an aversion to naval officers ordered Porter out of his establishment. Porter refused to leave until he had finished his drink. Enraged and drunk, the proprietor knocked him down and was preparing to deliver another blow when Porter drew his dirk (a short sword) and buried it in his assailant’s chest, killing him on the spot. And then there was the time a drunken English sailor approached Porter’s ship, anchored in Malta, and insulted the American flag. Porter had the sailor hauled aboard and flogged, almost setting off a war with Great Britain.
The passage of years might have been expected to dim Porter’s fires. Not so. By the time he received the call to return to the Caribbean, he was 42 years old and comfortably ensconced in Washington as a gentleman farmer and one of three members of the Board of Navy Commissioners. (This was the highest authority in the navy after the secretary, performing many of the functions that would be given to the chief of naval operations in 1915.) As he slouched into middle age, he had become a bit of a dandy, sporting a monocle, gilt buttons, and a gold-headed cane. Unfortunately his expensive lifestyle, growing family, and lack of financial acumen left his bank account nearly empty. Hoping to reduce his expenses and escape his creditors, Porter volunteered to go to sea again.
The commodore assembled a 16-ship squadron with some unusual features. He acquired five 20-oared barges that could pursue pirates into coastal waters, as well as the Sea Gull, the first steam-powered warship ever to go into battle. This Mosquito Fleet (as it came to be called) was needed, Porter explained, to root out “the freebooters and murderers” in their “haunts . . . among the roaring of breakers and the screams of sea-birds.” That was precisely where Porter’s eager captains went. In just six weeks nearly all the larger pirate craft in the Caribbean were either captured or driven into hiding. But it was impossible to patrol every inlet, every cove, every lagoon on every island, especially since the Americans were receiving scant cooperation from Spanish authorities.
Porter tried to enlist the help of Puerto Rico’s governor, but when he sent the USS Fox into San Juan harbor a shore battery fired on the American ship, killing its skipper. Porter reacted with, for him, uncharacteristic restraint; he chose to accept the governor’s apology. The next time he would not be so accommodating—much to his subsequent regret.
On October 26, 1824, Lieutenant Charles T. Platt, commanding the three-gun schooner Beagle, received word that a warehouse in St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, had been looted of $5,000 worth of goods. The warehouse belonged to the American vice-consul, and he informed Platt that the robbers had most likely come from Foxardo (now Fajardo), a small town on the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, just 40 miles away. Platt set sail at once. Not wanting to alarm the locals, Platt and another officer changed into civilian clothes before landing. They walked into the village of Foxardo where they met with the local alcalde (mayor), who denounced Platt himself as a “damned pirate” and threw him and his colleague in jail. Before long, they were released, and allowed to return to their ship amid the laughter and hisses of the locals.
“Make sail at once for Foxardo!” commanded the quick-tempered Porter when he heard of this “outrage.” The commodore determined to exact a personal apology from the alcalde that, he hoped, would serve as an object lesson for other island officials. Just after sunrise on November 14, 1824, three ships of the Mosquito Fleet anchored off Foxardo. Porter personally led some 200 men in long boats to shore. The Spaniards fled before them, and Porter’s men spiked two port guns. The heavily armed landing party, bristling with “muskets, bayonets, pistols, cutlasses and boarding pikes,” marched up the dusty road to the village, the commodore striding in front accompanied by a drummer beating step. Porter sent a message to the alcalde demanding his immediate apology “for outrages heaped upon an American officer” and warning that “if any resistance is made, the total destruction of Foxardo will be the certain and immediate consequence.” Within 15 minutes, the cowed local officials proffered the demanded apology and the landing party sailed away.
Porter thought he had ably defended “national honor,” but President James Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, were not happy when they found out about this violation of Spanish sovereignty. Coming soon after the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, which pledged that America would not interfere with Europe’s existing possessions in the New World as long as no more were acquired, Porter’s actions were a distinct embarrassment to the administration. He was relieved of command, and a court of inquiry was convened.
Porter was livid. He pointed out, correctly, that General Andrew Jackson had been cheered, not jeered, when in 1818 he had invaded Spanish Florida and occupied several forts on his own initiative. The irate commodore compounded his difficulties by publicly and unwisely lashing out against the president and secretary of the navy. This led the navy to convene a court-martial chaired by Captain James Barron—the very same officer who had been convicted of negligence in the Chesapeake-Leopard affair 13 years before by a court-martial that had included David Porter!
After a five-week trial in the sweltering summer of 1825, Porter was found guilty of disobedience of orders and insubordination. Even though he received only a six-month suspension with full pay, the commodore’s pride was lacerated. In a fit of pique, he renounced his American commission, left his wife behind, and accepted an offer to start a navy for newly independent Mexico. After this short-lived, unhappy assignment, Porter wheedled a job out of newly elected President Andrew Jackson: U.S. envoy to Constantinople. Here the 63-year-old commodore died in 1843, but he would continue to exercise influence on the American navy long after his death: His adopted son, David Glasgow Farragut (who as a 12-year-old midshipman had been part of the Marquesas landing), would become the navy’s first admiral. Porter’s natural son, David Dixon Porter, would succeed Farragut as the navy’s senior officer in 1870 upon his adopted brother’s death. And Theodore Roosevelt, preeminent chronicler of the War of 1812, would be inspired by Porter’s exploits.
As for the pirates of the Caribbean, their days were numbered when, in 1825, the Spanish governors of Cuba and Puerto Rico finally agreed to cooperate in American suppression efforts. The Spaniards had gotten upset when the pirates had turned from looting foreign ships to banditry on land. Dozens of cutthroats were subsequently hanged. By 1826, the new commander of the West India Squadron could report, “Depredations on our commerce are fortunately unheard of where they were formerly so frequent.” Much of the credit for this triumph goes to the U.S. Navy. American records indicate that the Royal Navy captured 13 pirate vessels with 300 men; the U.S. Navy is credited with seizing 80 vessels with 1,300 men. Anglo-American action had ended more than three centuries of piracy in the West Indies.
Falkland Islands
The West India Squadron was only one of five the navy deployed abroad in the 1820s. None was particularly powerful, certainly not to rival the Royal Navy, but the U.S. fleet did show the flag and attempt to protect Americans abroad. The Mediterranean Squadron, a remnant of the Barbary Wars, combated piracy growing out of the Greek War of Independence. The Pacific Squadron sent a warship to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1826 and another to Tahiti, while attempting with limited success to protect American merchantmen from both Spanish and Latin American privateers preying on neutral shipping. The Africa Squadron tried to suppress the slave trade.
The Brazil (or South Atlantic) Squadron had its hands full with the first Falkland Islands crisis. Argentina, which seceded from Spain in 1810 (and was formally known as the United Provinces of La Plata), claimed sovereignty over these islands; so did Britain. The Argentine governor, Louis Vernet, asserted his authority by ordering foreigners to stop hunting whales or seals in his domain, which Americans had been doing for years, depleting the herds in the process. In an attempt to enforce his edict, Vernet seized three U.S. schooners in 1831. Buenos Aires refused to comply with the indignant demands of the U.S. consul to return the fishing vessels, so Master Commandant Silas Duncan sailed his 18-gun sloop, USS Lexington, to the islands “to render justice to our citizens.” He seized property taken from the American ships, released the American seamen, spiked the fort’s cannon, captured a number of Argentine colonists, and posted a decree warning that anyone interfering with American fishing rights would be considered a pirate.
The Argentines were so furious by this incursion into their “colony” that they broke diplomatic relations with Washington. A few years before, President John Quincy Adams, a veteran diplomat, cultivated and somewhat prissy, might have been furious too. But the pugnacious and earthy Andrew Jackson, the backwoods general who now occupied the White House, was not perturbed. He heartily approved of Duncan’s conduct in defending American interests.
The dispute ended in 1833 when a landing party of Royal Marines raised the Union Jack over the Falklands, a task facilitated by Duncan’s actions in weakening the Argentine hold over the islands. President Jackson did not object to this violation of the Monroe Doctrine; these flyspeck islands in the South Atlantic were hardly worth a crisis with London. The U.S. had no more trouble with the Falklands for two decades. In 1854, however, the Royal Navy arrested two American merchant captains in another dispute over seal-hunting rights. The American warship Germantown appeared and threatened to bombard the British courthouse where the Americans were imprisoned, whereupon the British authorities let the merchant captains off with a light fine. This was the second Falklands crisis—and the last until 1982.
Pepper and Pirates
The biggest U.S. small war of the 1830s occurred in far away Sumatra, now part of Indonesia. Starting in 1788, merchants from Salem, Massachusetts, had established a flourishing pepper trade with the Sumatrans, trading either cheap trinkets or opium for the popular spice. There were millions of dollars in profits to be made—but also big risks in dealing with the natives. “The people,” writes one descendent of the Salem pepper traders, “were tricky, aggressive and brutal but with a good deal of real courage.” No doubt the Sumatrans thought the same about the Americans.
Occasionally a merchant ship would let down its guard and be swarmed by Sumatran pirates, who would kill the crew and plunder the vessel. That was the fate suffered by a U.S. merchantman inaptly named Friendship, which in 1831 anchored off Quallah Battoo (now Kuala Batu), a village on the northwest coast of Sumatra that was ostensibly ruled by the sultan of Acheen but was in reality autonomous. On February 7 the first officer and two seamen were killed, three others wounded. A handful of crew members, including Captain Charles M. Endicott, who happened to be ashore at the time, escaped the pirates and sought assistance from three other U.S. merchantmen anchored 25 miles away at the port of Muckie (now Muki). After a short gun battle, the sailors recovered the Friendship but found its decks bloodstained and its holds ransacked. The property loss, including stolen opium, was valued at over $40,000. None of the pirates was captured, but Endicott warned the rajahs who ran the village, “Within the space of twelve months, a big ship from the United States would most assuredly visit Quallah Battoo and punish the aggressors.”
Which is just what happened. The Friendship’s owners, who included Senator Nathaniel Silsbee of Massachusetts, persuaded President Andrew Jackson to divert the 44-gun frigate Potomac, already scheduled to visit China, to make a stop in Sumatra first. At 2:00 P.M. on February 5, 1832, the Potomac, disguised as a Dutch merchant ship, dropped anchor off Quallah Battoo. A couple of hours later, seven officers pretending to be civilian sailors eager to buy pepper were sent in a whaleboat to scout the shoreline. They discovered a town of some 4,000 people defended by a few ramshackle forts. Captain Jack Downes, a bellicose sort who had served as Porter’s first “luff” (lieutenant) during the mission to the Marquesas, had heard in Cape Town, South Africa, that the Sumatrans were not to be trusted. So he decided to ignore the first part of his orders—to investigate Captain Endicott’s account and, if it was found to be accurate, “demand . . . restitution.” Only if the natives “delayed beyond a reasonable time” was he authorized to inflict “ample punishment” on them. Downes decided to skip straight to the punishment.
At 4:15 the next morning, 282 sailors and marines splashed through the surf and advanced on the rajahs’ forts under cover of the Potomac’s guns. The Sumatrans “raised their war-whoop, and resisted most manfully, fighting with spears, sabres, and muskets,” wrote the Potomac’s schoolmaster, but the “resistance of the natives was in vain.” Three of the forts fell in short order, and the town was set ablaze. This, the first U.S. battle in Asia, left two Americans dead and eleven wounded. The next day, Downes moved the Potomac closer to shore and unleashed several broadsides at the remaining fort. The Sumatrans had had enough. A delegation of rajahs rowed out to the Potomac and promised they would do no more harm to Americans in the future, though they still refused to pay any restitution. Downes, convinced he could achieve nothing more, sailed away, leaving an estimated 100 Sumatran corpses in his wake.
Back home, with partisan feelings running high and a presidential campaign underway, his actions elicited considerable criticism. Whig opponents of the Andrew Jackson administration, already smarting over the veto of a bill chartering the Second Bank of the United States, denounced Downes for killing men, women, and children with scant provocation—and without winning any indemnity.
They were also upset that Jackson had authorized the expedition without Congress’s say-so. “If the President can direct expeditions with fire and sword against the Malays,” opined the National Intelligencer on July 10, 1832, “we do not see why he may not have the power to do the same in reference to any other power or people.” The answer was that Jackson did enjoy this authority—just as Jefferson had in ordering the fleet to deal with the Barbary pirates. The pro-administration Washington Globe, in chastising “These learned Puffendorffs” at the rival Intelligencer, made essentially this point.
The real problem, as Navy Secretary Levi Woodbury pointed out in a private letter to Jack Downes, was that he had disobeyed orders by not having made a “previous demand . . . for restitution and indemnity” before attacking Quallah Battoo. Replied an indignant Downes: “No demand for satisfaction was made previous to my attack because I was satisfied . . . that no such demand would be answered, except only by refusal.” It was not an especially convincing argument, but the Jackson administration had no intention of repeating the unpleasantness that had attended the court-martial of Downes’s friend and mentor, David Porter, seven years before. While quietly cutting short Downes’s naval career—he would never command another ship and would end his days as a lighthouse inspector—the administration publicly praised his mission to Quallah Battoo. “The result of that visit,” Secretary Woodbury wrote at the end of 1832, “has been to silence all exultation and menaces of further violence from those sea robbers.”
The secretary spoke too soon. In 1833 the U.S. merchantman Derby was loading pepper off Trabangunchute, Sumatra, when it was attacked by an armed ship; the crew barely managed to fend off the pirates. The Eclipse, which anchored off Trabangunchute five years later, was less lucky. The captain’s local agent—a Sumatran named Libbee Sumat who served as an intermediary with the pepper sellers—tipped off his clan that the ship would make a prime target, since some of the men were sleeping ashore and the captain was not feeling well. Libbee Sumat’s relatives boarded the ship pretending to be friendly, enjoyed a nice cup of tea with the captain, then pulled out long knives and killed the unsuspecting skipper before driving the rest of the crew overboard. The loot, valued at $20,000, was divided among the villages of Soo Soo, Quallah Battoo, and Muckie. “The Malays are growing so insolent that they will be for taking all vessels where there is the least chance of success,” complained one American merchant skipper.
U.S. Navy Captain George C. Read and Commander Thomas W. Wyman heard about the attack while anchored in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were paying a courtesy call with their ships, the frigate Columbia and the sloop John Adams, respectively. The ships promptly sailed for the west coast of Sumatra, anchoring off Quallah Battoo on December 19, 1838. Mindful of Downes’s example, Read decided to talk first and, if necessary, fight later. But the negotiations did not get far, so on December 24 the American ships opened fire on Quallah Battoo’s ramshackle forts, which had been reconstructed since Downes’s visit six years before. The U.S. squadron then proceeded to Muckie, where preliminary talks aimed at securing restitution yielded nothing. On January 1, 1839, both U.S. ships opened fire, then landed some sailors and marines, who burned the town and its forts. The local inhabitants had been given ample time to evacuate and apparently only one person was killed. Read was preparing to repeat this operation at Soo Soo but took pity on the villagers and sailed back to Quallah Battoo, whose rajahs offered peace terms. They agreed to pay $2,000 compensation to the owners of the Eclipse and to protect American shipping in the future. With this, the second Sumatran punitive expedition—far less bloody than the first—came to an end.
Although a few more attempts were made, no more U.S. ships were captured by Sumatran pirates. Before long, however, there were no more U.S. ships to attack. In 1846 the Dutch took over Sumatra and erected trade barriers that ended the Salem-to-Sumatra pepper trade. It was experiences such as this that gradually convinced Washington that it had better promulgate and enforce an open-door policy, lest the U.S. be locked out of developing markets by European colonialists.
Diplomats Afloat
Even when the navy was supposed to be performing other functions, its ships and men somehow often found themselves the victims of native “outrages” that simply had to be avenged. Consider the United States Exploring Expedition, six ships under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes that performed invaluable work surveying the South Pacific from 1838 to 1842. Many of its 241 charts would be used by American forces in World War II; its vast store of specimens and artifacts would become the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution. But the pursuit of science in those days was hardly a bloodless affair. The Americans clashed with the locals in Fiji, Samoa, and Drummonds Island, burning a number of villages and killing dozens of natives.
It is easy enough with hindsight to condemn Yankee imperialism, but sometimes that high-handedness served an undoubtedly moral end. Consider the small amount of help rendered by the U.S. Navy to one of the Hungarian nationalists who rose up unsuccessfully to challenge the Habsburg Empire in 1848—a liberal revolt that aroused passionate approval in the United States. After the uprising was crushed with the help of the czar’s armies, one of the revolutionaries, Martin Koszta, escaped to the U.S. and announced his intention of becoming an American citizen. Before acting on this wish, however, he sailed on personal business to Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey, where he was kidnapped by Austrian agents and imprisoned aboard a Habsburg warship anchored in the harbor.
The U.S. sloop St. Louis, 18 guns, happened to be on the scene. Its captain, Duncan N. Ingraham, after consulting with the local U.S. chargé d’affaires and after directing fruitless diplomatic entreaties to the Austrians, issued an ultimatum: Either the Austrians released Koszta, or the Americans would “take him by force.” Just 10 minutes before the ultimatum was due to expire on July 2, 1853, and with the St. Louis’s guns trained on their ship, the Austrians freed their prisoner. This action, which drew an apoplectic reaction from the Habsburg emperor, was greeted with jubilation and approbation back in America. Ingraham received a gold medal and a promotion from Congress.
Another example of humanitarian action was the effort to stamp out the slave trade, which the U.S. joined intermittently after Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807. The main role in capturing slavers was played by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, but the U.S. Navy contributed a few ships of its own, starting with the Cyane in 1820. After the early 1820s, the American effort slacked off until the late 1830s, when the Van Buren administration sent fresh ships to the “Dark Continent.” Under the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the U.S. and Britain each pledged to maintain a squadron with at least 80 guns off the west coast of Africa. Yet the British remained far more enthusiastic about capturing slavers than the U.S. Navy, a government department often run by Southerners. Between 1842 and 1861, U.S. patrollers captured just 24 slave vessels, to the Royal Navy’s 595. The U.S. Africa Squadron tended to place more emphasis on protecting U.S. commerce and the freed-slave settlement of Liberia than on stalking slavers.
One of the commanders of the Africa Squadron in the 1840s was Commodore Matthew C. Perry, brother of the late Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (victor of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812). He of course gained immortality not for his actions in Africa but for opening Japan to the West in 1853–55, a project first proposed by David Porter in 1815. This feat, which changed the course of history, lies outside the scope of this narrative since it was a peaceful achievement, not a small war. Nevertheless it is worth noting that it was a representative of the navy, not the State Department, who opened up the land of the rising sun, and he did it by boldly leading an armada of “black ships”—including two steamships—into Edo (Tokyo) Bay and awing the Japanese with Western military technology.
The navy frequently assisted American diplomats in the nineteenth century, helping to negotiate scores of treaties opening new vistas for American commerce. For instance, the cruise of the sloop Peacock in 1832–33 resulted in trade treaties with the king of Siam (now Thailand) and the sultan of Muscat, whose domain stretched from Arabia to the African isle of Zanzibar. These were the first such agreements the U.S. concluded in the Far East and Middle East.
The navy’s successes were usually peaceful; it was the failures that turned into small wars.
China
Americans had plenty of both in China, where their interests ran the gamut from profiteering to proselytizing. The first American commercial vessel, the Empress of China, visited the Middle Kingdom in 1784; the first missionaries arrived in 1830. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Yankee merchants had grabbed a small share of the lucrative opium market dominated by the British (British opium came from India, American opium from Turkey). When the Manchu court tried to crack down on this commerce, Great Britain went to war. The Opium War of 1840–1842 resulted in a decisive British victory. China was forced to sign treaties opening up five ports to British trade, ceding Hong Kong to British sovereignty, and giving British subjects extraterritorial privileges that made them immune from Chinese laws.
Captain Lawrence Kearny, commander of the U.S. East India Squadron (created in 1835), arrived in China with the aging frigate Constellation and the sloop Boston after the conclusion of hostilities. Kearney demanded that the Manchus extend to America the same terms they had granted Britain. Peking, hoping to play one set of barbarians off against another, was only too happy to comply. In 1844 U.S. envoy Caleb Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia which gave the U.S. merchants, like their British counterparts, most favored nation status and admission to five treaty ports. The treaty also stipulated that Americans committing crimes in China could only be tried by U.S. officials under U.S. laws. Thus America cleverly reaped the benefits of Britain’s war effort.
In 1850 the Taiping Rebellion broke out, engulfing China in one of the deadliest wars of the nineteenth century. At first the foreigners felt more threatened by imperial troops than by the rebels, who professed an ersatz version of Christianity. Starting in February 1854, Manchu bannermen began harassing and attacking foreigners around Shanghai. Indignity of indignities, they even occupied the foreigners’ racecourse. Commander John Kelly ordered 60 marines and sailors put ashore from the U.S. ship Plymouth. They joined about 150 British marines and sailors, as well as a number of civilian volunteers from Shanghai, in an assault on the imperial encampment. On April 4, 1854, the Anglo-American force routed the bannermen. Only two Americans were killed and four injured in the Battle of Muddy Flat. Horse racing resumed not long thereafter, much to the foreign settlement’s relief.
The biggest U.S. military operation in China prior to 1900 occurred as an offshoot of the Second Anglo-Chinese War, sometimes known as the Arrow war, after the name of a small ship seized by Chinese authorities in 1856 on suspicion of piracy. The British, claiming the Arrow had Hong Kong registry and a British flag, retaliated by bombarding Canton. When the subsequent fighting began to endanger Americans in the city, landing parties from the sail sloops Portsmouth and Levant and the steamship San Jacinto protected U.S. interests. On November 15, 1856, the Portsmouth’s skipper, Commander Andrew Hull Foote, was in his launch, with the U.S. flag clearly visible, when he was fired upon by two of the barrier forts on the Pearl River between Whampoa and Canton. (The Chinese gunners probably mistook the Stars and Stripes for the Union Jack.) All five shots missed. But the next day, a cannonball from one of the forts crashed into another American boat, decapitating the coxswain.
Foote was a 50-year-old veteran of the navy who had shown great zeal in the past in combating slave trafficking and would later distinguish himself during the Civil War with his command of Union gunboats in the Western theater. He was also a Puritan who crusaded for temperance and delivered scorching Sunday sermons to his sailors. But he was no turn-the-other-cheek Christian. After consulting with Commodore James Armstrong, who was in charge of the East India Squadron, he ordered an attack on the forts at once.
The Chinese turned out to be tougher opponents than the Fijians or Sumatrans. The barrier forts had European-designed fortifications with seven-foot granite walls and 176 guns manned by 5,000 troops. During the four-day battle that followed (November 16, 20–22, 1856), interrupted by unsuccessful negotiations, the Portsmouth and Levant were hit 49 times. A launch carrying some sailors ashore was hit and sunk. But these were not serious setbacks; China still had a long way to go before it acquired military parity with the West. A landing party of 287 sailors and marines had little trouble capturing and demolishing all four barrier forts. The final toll: seven Americans dead, 22 wounded. The Chinese loss was reckoned at more than 160 dead. The secretary of the navy lauded the East India Squadron for “the brave and energetic manner in which the wrong was avenged.” The Anglophilic Commander Foote received an accolade that might have been even closer to his heart when his warships returned to Whampoa anchorage to the cheers of British sailors.
As a result of the Arrow war, China agreed to open up 10 more ports to British trade. As in 1844, America won a parallel concession, the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin which included the Manchus’ promise to receive a U.S. minister in Peking and guaranteed missionaries the right to preach Christianity. In China, where the U.S. kept three ships to the Royal Navy’s 30 or so, America was almost a free rider, benefiting from British protection without paying much of a price. But in a pinch the Americans were always ready to help their fellow English speakers.
Tensions continued to run high between China and the Western powers since the imperial court never seemed willing to do as much to open up its country as the foreigners demanded. In 1859, a joint Anglo-French force attacked the Taku Bar forts, at the mouth of the Pei-ho River leading to Peking. The European expedition ran into heavy fire and did not have enough steamers to tow the assault boats into position. U.S. Flag Officer Josiah Tattnall, watching the proceedings as an ostensibly neutral observer, lent the U.S. paddle-wheeler Toey-wan to help transport the British and French troops toward the forts under heavy fire. He also instructed his men to fire back at the Taku forts. A Southern romantic, Tattnall justified this unneutral stance—or so the legend goes—with a quote from Sir Walter Scott: “Blood is thicker than water.” Despite the American help, the Anglo-French assault failed, with heavy losses on the European side, but the next year their armies conquered Peking.
Policing the Globe
Blood is thicker than water. Many’s the time that British and American naval officers, dining together in port, would clink their glasses to that toast. There was even some truth to it. Although Britain and the U.S. were on the brink of hostilities numerous times after the War of 1812—over the Caroline incident of 1840, the Oregon boundary dispute of 1845–46 (“Fifty-Four-Forty or Fight”), the Trent affair of 1861, and the Venezuela border dispute of 1895—relations between their navies often grew quite cozy. At least in foreign waters. Like a family, they might quarrel among themselves, but to the world at large they would present a united face. Among the numerous instances of Anglo-American cooperation:
In 1845, the U.S. sloop St. Louis helped a Royal Navy vessel to evacuate British colonists from the New Zealand town of Kororareka just before it fell to a Maori attack.
In 1864, while the Civil War still raged at home, a small U.S.-chartered steamboat joined British, French, and Dutch naval forces in an assault on the daimyo of Chosu, an isolationist Japanese warlord who had closed the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign commerce. The USS Wyoming, an eight-gun corvette, had exchanged fire with the daimyo’s forts the previous year but had failed to silence them. This time the large Western force dismantled the threat. London was so grateful for the (negligible) American help that U.S. Navy Lieutenant Frederick Pearson received a knighthood.
In 1874, the USS Tuscarora and HMS Portsmouth put ashore landing parties in Honolulu to help restore order after supporters of a defeated aspirant to the throne stormed the Hawaiian legislature.
In 1882, the Royal Navy bombarded Alexandria, Egypt, to put down a nationalist uprising. One hundred fifty American sailors and marines landed to stop looting, fight fires, and protect American residents, becoming the first foreign troops to enter the city center.
These joint actions provide a clue to the U.S. Navy’s function during most of the nineteenth century. The navy had no difficulty conducting offensive operations in 1846–48 against Mexico, a country with no fleet of its own. But if called upon to confront a European flotilla, the navy would have found itself hopelessly outmatched. But that was not its role. Deploying a powerful armada capable of controlling the seas against all comers would have been a costly undertaking. Congress did not want to spend much money on defense and, with wide expanses of open space on either side of the United States, did not feel that it needed to do so.
Congress maintained only a small navy whose peacetime mission was to police the world, enforcing Western standards of behavior, protecting U.S. commerce, and serving as a general adjunct to U.S. diplomacy. No matter how tiny, the navy had little trouble overawing various pirates and tribesmen with its vastly superior technology and training. With the navy’s help, U.S. exports soared from $20 million in 1789 to $334 million in 1860. In short, naval captains were doing more or less the same job performed today by the World Trade Organization: integrating the world around the principle of free trade. It just so happened that trade negotiations in those days were a slightly bloodier affair than they are today; hence “butcher and bolt.” Since the Royal Navy was engaged in more or less the same task, it made sense for the two services to cooperate from time to time.
The major difference was that Britons wound up painting the world red, planting the Union Jack on one territory after another. This caused occasional tensions, as when a swaggering Royal Navy captain tried to lay claim to Hawaii in 1843, a move peacefully (and successfully) resisted by two U.S. naval vessels. For most of the nineteenth century, America contented itself with carving out what William Henry Seward called the “empire of the seas”—an informal empire based on trade and influence. David Porter’s efforts to annex the Marquesas notwithstanding, America was not interested in a formal overseas empire.
Not yet.