USS Essex (1799)
 Drawing of the USS Essex
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The 32-gun frigate USS Essex was one of the most famous ships in the early United States Navy . It was used in the quasi-war against France, the First Barbarian War in the Mediterranean and in the war of 1812 against Great Britain.
The Essex was - in contrast to z. B. USS Constitution - not involved in major naval battles. She spent most of her life in normal peacekeeping or escorting American merchant ships to protect against privateers. But she was the first US warship to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn . She was the first British warship, the 18-gun sloop HMS Alert (August 13, 1812) to be captured in the War of 1812 under Captain David Porter , and she was the first American warship in the South Pacific, where she was like "a Yankee cat among the British pigeons ”(John B. Dwyer) brought British whaling to a virtual standstill.
History of the ship
The construction
The Essex was launched on September 30, 1799 at the Enos Briggs shipyard in Salem . While it was nominally designated as a 32-gun frigate, it actually carried more guns, especially after 1809. The $ 139,362 construction cost had raised the population of the City of Salem, Essex, and Essex Counties. On December 17, the Essex was handed over to the United States Navy and placed under the command of Captain Edward Preble.
Calls
After the outbreak of quasi-war with France, the frigate was used under Prebles' command as an escort for East Indiamans who sailed from Batavia ( Java ) towards the United States . She was the first US warship to sail around Cape Horn in both directions. The next mission took the ship, now led by Captain William Bainbridge , to the Mediterranean Sea as part of a squadron under Commodore Richard Dale, which had the task of protecting US merchant ships against attacks by the barbarian pirates . After repairs in the Washington Naval Shipyard (1802), she returned to the Mediterranean Sea in 1804 during the First Barbarian War under the command of James Barron, took part in the successful attack on Derna on April 27, 1805 and stayed in these waters until the conclusion of the peace treaty in 1806 .
After returning to the Washington Naval Shipyard in July of this year, it was not used again until February 1809 for sporadic patrols in US waters and for a trip to Europe. Shortly after the beginning of the war with Great Britain in 1812, Captain David Porter undertook with her an advance southwards against British merchant ships. On July 11, the Americans succeeded in capturing a convoy of seven ships during a night attack, and on August 13, the Essex encountered the British Sloop Alert and forced them to surrender. By the time it returned to New York in September, the frigate took a total of ten enemy ships as prizes .
On October 28, the Essex ran out of the Delaware River to make a trip to the South Pacific with the Constitution and the USS Hornet . Porter's crew on this trip included midshipman David Glasgow Farragut , who achieved the rank of admiral in the American Civil War . After Porter had waited in vain for the other ships off the coast of Brazil, he decided to sail alone and began circumnavigating Cape Horn in January 1813. Despite heavy storms, the circumnavigation was successful, and on March 14, the ship anchored in Valparaíso ( Chile ) with two schooners captured on the way . In the following five months, Essex largely wiped out the British whaling industry in the Pacific. The Americans hijacked another 13 British ships, one of which, the Atlantic , was put into service by Porter under the name Essex Junior as an escort ship. In October 1813, the two ships reached the island of Nuku Hiva , which belongs to the Marquesas , but then returned to South America.
Captured by the British in 1814
In January 1814, the Essex ran into Chilean waters near Valparaíso and was here by a British formation sent to hunt her from the frigate HMS Phoebe (36 guns, Captain James Hillyar ) and the sloop HMS Cherub (18 guns, Captain Thomas Tudor Tucker ) Blocked for six weeks. During an attempt to break out, the Essex lost part of the main mast in a gust of wind on March 28 and could no longer escape the British. Although the American ship was still in neutral Chilean waters, Hillyar let fire open. He took advantage of the superiority of his long-barreled guns and led the fight over a long distance, at which the Essex, largely equipped with carronades , could hardly return fire effectively. After two and a half hours of fighting and 155 dead and wounded, Porter had to surrender to the British, who had only five dead and ten wounded. While the American side emphasized Hillyar's violation of Chilean neutrality in its assessment of this struggle, Theodore Roosevelt emphasized in his history of the naval war of 1812 that Porter would not have acted otherwise in his place.
British owned
At the end of June 1814, Captain Hillyar brought the badly damaged Essex around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro and sold it to the Prize Office of the Royal Navy , which repaired it and officially took it into service on August 4, 1814 as HMS Essex .
About a month later, Hillyar was commissioned to bring the Phoebe and Essex to Plymouth , England, where she arrived on November 11, 1814. There she was decommissioned shortly after the peace treaty of Ghent and lay unmanned and unnoticed in port until the Admiralty made her available to the Irish government as a prison hulk in 1824 and sailed to Kingstown , Ireland.
On July 6, 1837, the Essex was auctioned off to a Mr. Galsworthy for a little over £ 2,000 . Nothing is known about their further fate. Since she was no longer fit to sail, it can be assumed that she was scrapped and the wood was sold.
Footnotes
- ↑ The 1799 frigate Essex from Salem, Massachusetts should not be confused with the 238-tonne whaler Essex from Nantucket , which was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean in 1820 and whose fate was the model for Herman Melville's novel Moby- Was thick .
literature
- Frances Diane Robotti, James Vescovi: The USS Essex: and the Birth of the American Navy . - Holbrook : Adams Media Corporation, 1999; ISBN 1-59337-192-6
- James L. Mooney et al .: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships . - Washington, DC : Navy Department, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Naval History Division, 1959–1991
- Portia Takakjian: The 32 Gun Frigate Essex , Conway Maritime Press 2005.
Web links
- Depiction of the battle between the USS Essex and the British ships off Valparaíso from William James : The Naval history of Great Britain . - London, 1824. (Eng.)
- Description of the same battle from an American perspective from Alfred Thayer Mahan : Admiral Farragut . - New York, 1892. (Eng.)