Oliver Hazard Perry - by Evan Wilson
On September 7, I had the privilege of participating in the 300th Anniversary Speaker Series for the town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. I was asked to speak about Oliver Hazard Perry, who was born in South Kingstown in 1785 and went on to become one of the great heroes of the War of 1812. He led American forces to victory on Lake Erie in September 1813 while flying a famous flag:
After the battle, he also wrote a famous dispatch, telling the future president William Henry Harrison (then a U.S. Army general), “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
My lecture was mostly a biography of Perry, but I tried to add some value in two places. First, I provided the British perspective on the War of 1812, which is not something that American audiences often hear. Naturally, I drew on my research for The Horrible Peace to trace how Britain’s focus on the war changed over time amid demobilization in Europe.
Second, I pointed out the double irony of Perry’s flag. In June 1813, Perry’s friend, Captain James Lawrence, had disobeyed orders and sailed out from Boston in USS Chesapeake to fight HMS Shannon. As his ship was being smashed to pieces in just fifteen minutes, Lawrence’s last order to his crew before he was carried below, mortally wounded, was, “Don’t give up the ship.” His crew did just that. Perry had the flag made to honor Lawrence, obviously without acknowledging the irony.
But that’s not the only irony. To win the Battle of Lake Erie, Perry had to give up his own badly-damaged ship, the aptly-named Lawrence. The British thought he had surrendered, but instead, Perry rowed over to the Niagara, took command, and transformed what was looking like a defeat into victory. My point was simply that Perry gave up the ship on which he flew the flag “Don’t give up the ship.”
What follows is the opening section of my lecture. I saw this lecture as an opportunity to practice telling a life story out of order—that’s not exactly rocket science, but it can be done poorly. In this case, I began not with Perry’s birth but with the lowest moment in his career.
The USS Revenge was a seventy-one-foot-long schooner armed with fourteen six-pound guns. She had been built in New Orleans in 1806, and her small size and light armament made her most suited for coastal patrols. Normally, the commanding officer would be a master commandant—equivalent to a commander today. But in January 1811, her captain was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant named Oliver Hazard Perry. He had been in command since April 1809, so he knew the ship and her crew of about 50 well. He also knew the waters in which Revenge was sailing. Revenge had spent the last two years rotating between service in New York, in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the triangle formed between Montauk, Nantucket, and Newport. Perry’s most recent orders had been to survey entrance to Narragansett Bay to improve navigation in that area. But that was a difficult task to accomplish in the middle of the winter, so he had run out of the time his commanding officer, Commodore John Rodgers, had allotted to him for the task. On the night of January 8, Perry decided to sail Revenge from Newport to New London, where Rodgers was based, to ask for more time. The tide schedule meant that the best time to sail was at midnight, so Perry began moving Revenge out to Fort Wolcott on Goat Island that evening.
Normally, Perry would have ordered his executive officer (in those days called a first lieutenant) to handle the overnight leg. On this night, though, that wasn’t an option. His second-in-command was Acting Lieutenant Jacob Hite, and he was probably drunk. Perry had placed Hite in confinement—basically, locked him in his cabin—until he could get to Rodgers to figure out what to do with him. So Perry turned instead to a pilot he had hired as his acting master, Peter Daggett, and asked him to handle the overnight duties.
Both Perry and Daggett knew coastal Rhode Island well. Perry of course was born here in South Kingstown, about which much more to come, and Daggett was also a local. Both men had grown up sailing these waters. That made them confident that they could handle the tricky navigation on a winter’s night, with a high likelihood of fog in the morning. Perry and Daggett decided to take the shortest course to New London, which was to steer between Fisher’s Island and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, through what is known as The Race. First, that meant giving Point Judith a wide berth. Perry gave Daggett those orders and then went to sleep around one in the morning, trusting that Daggett knew what he was doing.
At nine o’clock, the leadsman—the man responsible for dropping a lead-weighted line to check to see how much water was under the keel—called out “ten fathoms,” which was just sixty feet. Perry, startled, came rushing out of his cabin to the deck. The leadsman then called “five fathoms”—just thirty feet. Perry knew that meant trouble, so he immediately ordered the best anchor dropped.
In the fog, it was hard to be certain, but Perry assumed that he was 8-10 miles east of Watch Hill Reef. In fact, as the leadsman’s calls suggested, Revenge was on the reef. Worse, it was now high tide again. When Revenge struck the reef, therefore, the water level was going to get worse before it got better. Perry ordered the anchor cable cut to prevent the ship from swinging around and grounding even worse. But the swell pushed Revenge higher onto the reef.
Perry remained calm despite the danger. The fastest way to lighten the ship was to throw the guns overboard, so he gave that order. He released Jacob Hite from confinement. He sent a boat out with the second anchor to find deep water, which they did, but pulling on the anchor to get the ship off the reef didn’t work. Next, he sent a midshipman ashore to get help from Commodore Rodgers in New London. Help arrived at 3pm, but the wind and the swell had come up in the meantime, preventing them from attaching a tow line. Next, Perry ordered the masts cut down to save weight, and the crew worked hard to do that and man the pumps. But then Revenge struck harder and began to flood too quickly for the pumps. Perry gave the fateful order to abandon ship. At sunset on January 9, 1811, Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry abandoned his first command as a wreck on the Watch Hill Reef. There were no casualties, but the ship was a total loss.
And so that’s how the career of the great naval hero of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, came to a premature end.
(It didn’t, of course, and my lecture then flashed back to his birth before catching up to Revenge and going from there.)
You can read more about the events associated with the series here and an interview with me in the local paper here. If they ever post the video of the talk, I’ll edit this post to add the link. They may not ever post it to spare me some embarrassment. I had caught a stomach bug from my kids that morning, and the auditorium was without air conditioning. I’m pretty sure I looked like a sweaty zombie, and I had to shout to be heard over a giant floor fan.
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