Enterprise and Boxer: The Battle off Maine's Coast

.

On September 5, 1813, during the War of 1812, the USS Enterprise, cruising the coast of Maine, encountered the brig HMS Boxer off Pemaquid Point and began a violent, brief battle which has entered US Naval lore and was memorialized in poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Although the Royal Navy had done little to blockade trade north of Cape Cod, as we shall see later, the Coast of Maine was nonetheless open to depredation by British warships and privateers. In once incident, linked to Harpswell, James Sinnett of Bailey Island and his brothers were engaged in fishing when hailed by a large vessel identifying itself as the US warship, Essex. When they came aboard, they were informed they were on the 18 gun HMS Rattler, and were prisoners! The captain loaded the Sinnett’s schooner with 20 Royal Navy seamen, who were then ordered to reconnoiter the coast. After a week, during which the brothers were well treated, their boat was returned and the Rattler sailed south.
In fact the Rattler sailed on into the mouth of the Merrimac River at Newburyport! The communities along the coast began to doubt the efficiency of the US Navy, and in response the Navy transferred the Enterprise to Portsmouth to patrol the area.
The Enterprise had recently returned from a mission familiar to today’s Navy. She had been engaged in combating pirates off the coast of Africa. Refitted as a brig and mounted with 16 guns, she was ready for business. The new captain, William Burrows, had recently arrived from Philadelphia and prepared her for sea.
In the meantime, the HMS Boxer, also rigged out as a brig and armed with 14 guns was making its way southwest from St. John, NB. Off the coast of Lubec, she sighted and captured a small sailing craft, which was “manned” by a group of women out for a sail. Samuel Blyth, the captain, had them brought aboard, informed them politely that perhaps they should confine their pleasure cruising closer in shore and released them, to return with stories of their adventures. By coincidence, one of the ladies was the wife of the militia commander in the area, who was so impressed with Blyth’s chivalrous behavior, that he placed advertisements in local newspapers announcing it. It is a poignant feature of this story is, that despite being at war, the combatants did not seem to hold any hostility towards one another.
Burrows left Portsmouth along the coast testing the speed and handling of his ship as he went. The winds were very calm, and the crew was engaged, from time to time in sweeping, and exhausting task, which involved the deployment of large oars from the side of the ship. On September 4, near Portland, the crew could hear cannon fire coming from the area near Sequin Island, but due to the calm weather, they were unable to close and determine its source.
By the morning of September 5, off Pemaquid, they sighted a ship at anchor in the harbor there. They watched as the strange vessel shook loose its sails and slowly came out to meet them. Lookouts in the masts saw three Union Jacks flying, and the crew of the Enterprise prepared themselves for a battle. But Burrows surprised them. He ordered the Enterprise to pull out to sea away from the approaching Britisher. His crew, spoiling for a fight, was outraged. However, they soon realized what their captain was up to: He was maneuvering his ship to get the wind advantage and test his own speed against that of the enemy. Around 2 PM Burrows ordered the “beat to quarters,” and the battle began with broadsides from both vessels. The black powder from the guns soon turned the area into a manmade fog bank.
Henry Wadsworth Longefellow’s poetic account tells of the citizens of Portland hearing the gunfire from the battle, but that was not true. From the top of the observatory, the keeper with a telescope could see the battle and called down its progress as he could see it. Inhabitants of Edgecomb and Wiscasset could hear the distant grumbling, however.
Aboard the ships life was a hell of fear and confusion. Lethal metal and wood fragments flew everywhere. Blyth was struck in the body and killed. Cpt. Burrows was hit in the groin by a musket ball fired from the Boxer’s tops and fatally wounded.
Using its superior speed, the Enterprise moved ahead of the Boxer, swung to starboard bringing its broadside to bear down the entire length of the doomed ship. The top of the enemy’s mainmast fell, bringing down much of the rigging. Pivoting the other way, the Enterprise raked the Boxer with another broad side.
It was evident the Boxer was finished. Second Lieutenant Tillinghast called across to his adversary asking if they were ready to quit. An officer shouted back they were not, but he was quickly pulled to the deck and a second officer declared they were. “Pull down your colors,” Tillinghast commanded. “We can’t.” came the reply, “They’re nailed up to the mast.” “Send some one up to cut them down. We’ll hold our fire.” And so the battle ended.
When presented with his dead adversary’s sword, the dying Burrows asked that it be returned to Blyth’s family and said, “I die contented.”
The Enterprise with Boxer following under control of a prize crew sailed slowly back passed Halfway Rock into Portland Harbor.
It is now known if any residents of Harpswell were down on the shore, for certainly anyone fishing off Bailey Island might well have been able to see the smoke and the distant thunder of the guns. That information, if it exists is not known.
In Portland Harbor, First Lieutenant Edward McCall, now in command of the Enterprise began the work of repair and personnel matters. He was quite surprised with he was approached by a local business man with a strange request. The gentleman represented a group of business people, he claimed, who had shipped in a boat load of English wool. They had engaged Blyth, while the Boxer was in St. John, and had in fact, given him a £100 note for protection. Their goods were aboard a Swedish vessel, Margaretta, and were escorted by the Boxer to the mouth of the Kennebec where, they had requested Blyth fire off a few cannon to make it appear that they had been chased into port. Would McCall sell them back the note for $500? The lieutenant was incensed at first, but the gentleman, obviously a smooth talker, convinced him that the wool was needed by the Army, and it was for that reason that this group of citizens was using the enemy’s navy for protection.
Yankee and English merchants were not adverse to continue trading with each other and a brisk trade apparently existed between Mainers and British ships hovering off shore. The commander of the fort built at Cundy’s Harbor at the time, for example, wanted to put a stop to it, and ordered all vessels leaving the Harbor pull in for inspection. One fishing vessel owned by a man named Dingley refused, and the guard at the fort fired, holing his boat, which barely made it back to shore. Whether that created more obedience to the rules, we do not know.
There were further prisoner issues to clear up. A group of fishermen from nearby Monhegan Island had approached the Boxer earlier, requesting that the surgeon come to the island to attend to an injured colleague. The kindly Blyth allowed him to go accompanied by two midshipman and an army officer passenger, who wanted to participate in some bird hunting.
Once they knew the battle was to be joined, they borrowed a rowboat to return, but were unable to catch up and had to return to the island where the inhabitants figured it would be a good idea to take their weapons, which were just fowling pieces. The four “guests,” watched the battle from the cemetery up the hill from the landing, and were returned to Portland to join their shipmates in captivity.
On September 9, both captains were buried side by side on Munjoy Hill in Portland with full military honors. The local authorities allowed their British prisoners to march in the parade and accompany their captain to his gravesite.
The Enterprise was repaired and ended her days in the Caribbean aground on a ledge, with no loss of life. The Boxer was also repaired, sold to private interests and ended her days as a merchantman.

The Selkie, for lack of a better title

I like to snorkel. Hovering motionless over a world of waving seaweed and little fish flitting back and forth, it is probably the closest thing I will ever come to flying without the use of a parachute or hang glider. I also spend time floating with my hands behind my head, an ability I inherited from an uncle with an abnormally large lung capacity. He would lie back in the lake in front of his camp with a cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, as easily as if he were on an air mattress. He and my aunt had no children of their own, and with his Irish knack of telling stories and “inventing” the truth, he was a favorite of his nieces, nephews and any other kid who happened by for that matter. But that is another story.
Without a wetsuit, I stay in, until my core temperature reaches a critical point and then climb out on the rocks to sit in the sun. It all feels so natural. Perhaps it is a genetic memory from some bygone era when a webbed footed ancestor first left the sea to soak up the sun and avoid the fangs of some Precambrian sharkodont, or something like that. Or perhaps one of my early Scottish ancestors was a selkie, a mythical creature from Scotland and the surrounding islands, who was a seal while in the water and a man upon the land. I suspect there may have been more truth than myth to the story. My guess is, the creature was invented to explain the unexplained pregnancies in shore clinging communities, caused in actuality by some Norse sea raider, who came, had his way and then disappeared over the seas.
Today the clouds to the west and southwest were dark and foggy. Off shore was Hurricane Bill, too far to bring wind or rain, but he would be felt. While the wind was calm and the boats riding quietly at anchor, floating in the waters tucked away from the open ocean in Casco Bay, I could feel his pull. There was an almost imperceptible current that pulled at me as I tried to hover over a rock, watching the periwinkles cleaning algae, unaware of my presence.
At last the tide withdrew so I could no longer snorkel, the seaweed lay down on the rocks, and the shellfish closed up awaiting the return of the water. The plovers, chatting like a group of old men on the end of the point, removed to the rocks and sand to hunt for their meal. Hurricane Bill moved further off towards Nova Scotia, and I came up into the woods to resume my life on land. I put my webbed feet by the hose to wash off the salt water, and sat down to watch the Red Sox beat the Yankees in good, old Fenway.

Tourists and Other Stupid People

I don’t really care much for idiots. Now, I’m not talking about someone who is ignorant because they haven’t been exposed to something, or someone who maybe doesn’t get it, but is at least giving it a try; what I’m talking about are the people who are so numb they not only don’t know anything, they don’t even suspect anything.
And amazingly many of them end up here in Maine either as tourists or new residents, who have “discovered” us. How they discovered us, when we knew we were already here is a bit beyond me, but maybe I’m stupid too. Anyway, the question has often occurred to me as to how these people got jobs that provided them enough money to get here, and how they found there way here in the first place.
Case in point, the stupidest newcomer of the summer of 2009. It is noon at the Harpswell Anchor newspaper office. It is always that time of the day when they drive into our yard to either buy something, which is good, or to ask for free stuff, which isn’t. They have all day, for God sake, why the stroke of noon when we are a mouthful into our deserved sandwich? A Subaru, good giveaway that the driver is probably and elderly woman, pulls into the parking lot, and a gray haired lady gets out, comes into the office, opens her purse and puts two letters on the table. As we stare in wonderment, she asks, “Aren’t you the Post Office?” When we respond in the negative, she replies, “Well, I saw a flag and a sign, so I figured you were.” Now our sign says, “Anchor Publishing,” which I guess where she came from was close. We then gave her directions, and when she left, I added, the building has a sign in front of it that says “Post Office.” Damn, and you know she probably had a college degree.
When I retired from state servitude, I was asked by a local commercial fisherman, a long time friend, if I would manage his wharf. That entailed weighing up crates of lobsters, filling and salting barrels of bait, and dealing with the occasional tourist who wanted the experience of buying “fresh” lobster. Inevitably, as I pulled a crate of live, flapping lobsters from the water, I would be asked, “Are those fresh?” Duh. “No,” I would reply, “They’re very well behaved.” This was usually greeted with the same expression, you’d get off a board fence.
The business was called “Dick’s Crabs & Lobsters.” One day an out of state car pulled up, a man got out and said, “Are you Dick?” “No,” I replied. “Well,” he said, “I’m a good friend of Dick and his boy, what’s his name,” and he always gives me lobsters at half price.” Yeah, really. “Well,” I replied, “When What’s His Name comes in, ask him.”
Most of the dumb questions involved crabs, and gave me the opportunity for great answers. Two identically attired gentlemen, one afternoon, asked “Where can we get crabs?” Huh, read the sign? “The toilet seat at the bus station is supposed to be a good place,” was my answer. The other common question was, “Do you have crabs?” “My response being, “Not since I used that soap the doctor gave me.”
One morning as I came up from the float, I found an elderly man and his wife in the bait shack going through the pockets of the pants and jackets the guys left to change into when they came back from a day’s fishing. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I just want to see what they carry with them?” was his innocent reply. “Could I go to your house and go through your stuff?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then get the hell off this wharf, do not buy lobsters here, do not pass Go.”
We Mainers aren’t unfriendly, we just don’t like being seen as a giant, open air, petting zoo.

The Woodstock Generation

I have often been asked if I attended the concert at Woodstock, and have been told that it "made us what we are today." To the former, I answer truthfully, "No," and to the latter, I politely reply that it has nothing whatsoever to do with who I am now or was at that time. You see, even if I had wanted to hitch a ride and sit in a rain soaked field to listen to music, I probably wouldn't have, although the free love part seemed intriguing, but I wasn't available at the time. I was in Vietnam, and not just In Country, but out in the middle of the jungle, as part of an infantry unit that basically lived there just as did our North Vietnamese colleagues. We did not watch the news on TV, did not get so see Bob Hope; none of that. That was for the REMF's, the Rear Echelon Mother, (you get the rest) So actually, we did not even know what it was or that it was even happening until the Special Services sent out a Life Magazine, which they did from time to time. You see, other than counting the days we had until we could get on the freedom bird back to The World, and letters from home, which arrived every two to three days, we were absolutely ignorant of anything going on outside of the grid square we happened to be located in at any given time.
It was the rainy season, and in the late afternoon, the skies would darken and open up in a deluge you might experience in a brief thundershower here, but over there, it lasted all night. It was rain that drowned out all sound in the complete darkness that was the jungle at night. Conversation was even difficult above the roar. For days at a time, we were soaked to the skin, covered with sores and depressed. So when the magazines arrived showing pictures of young hippies huddled under plastic bags at an event they voluntarily attended, we were less than sympathetic. There was no "wow" factor, only my medic's sardonic comment, "Ain't that some shit." To which we all responded with our form of agreement, "There it is."

The Joys of Flight

This morning we rose at 4AM, or “oh dark thirty” to get my daughter to the Portland, ME airport for a 7AM flight to Atlanta with a connection to Fort Walton Beach, FL for an Air Force school starting tomorrow. We arrived at 5:30, looked at the arrival board to see her flight listed as “on time.” Not so fast! At the check in there was a group of tired, surly people and a handwritten sign saying the flight was cancelled. No reason given, no weather problems, my guess from the number of people, they just didn’t want to run it at a loss and were going to fill up their other, later flights. A check of the website listed the flight as canceled from Portland but on time to its Houston connection from Atlanta. Hmmm.
So the best we can do is a 3:40 PM, and reservations on the remaining two flights into Ft. Walton, in case something else goes awry. Which of course it did. The flight was boarded shortly after 3 and sat on the runway until five. So my daughter has now been up since 4 AM and will arrive too late to make any connection, which will necessitate spending the night on a bench, and will report in late and exhausted some time tomorrow.
Why can’t we do better than this? Why can’t we have high speed rail like the rest of the developed world? When you consider all the hoohah at the airports, the fact that they are outside of the cities one is trying to reach, the homeland security drills and just being yanked around by the airlines, one could get on a train, say in Boston and be in New York, downtown, in less time and be more comfortable.
That’s my rant, because I have driven to Portland twice today and feel jet lagged myself.