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CHAPTER 1
From Virginia to Heartache
His life had begun on a faraway shore — where Virginia's Elizabeth River and Hampton Roads flowed into lower Chesapeake Bay — at Norfolk, on April 1, 1801. His ancestral home was Ireland; the family emigrated via the Port of Baltimore to America and put down roots at Frederick, Maryland. His father was engaged in business in Norfolk, and little else is known about him and Lynch's mother; William had two brothers, Edward and Eugene.
Norfolk was a city with such abiding maritime traditions that for someone like William Francis Lynch, to grow up on its sand-gritty cobbled streets with its tree-shadowed, brick-fronted houses was to always see one's destiny in the forest of masts bobbing majestically at anchorages that nearly surrounded the city. Every boyish exploration of the peninsula's inlets and marshes, of Norfolk's quarter of commercial streets, outdoor markets, wharves, warehouses, and its warrens of rooming houses, taverns, tattoo parlors, and curio shops, was accomplished with the odor of salt water in the nostrils. Shouldering throngs of merchant seamen and sailors and marines from the nearby naval base would tower over the local boys, lending a whiff of foreign ports, mysterious coasts, demanding seas.
After William's mother died when he was 17, he left home and school. There seemed to be little to hold the family together anyway, for the elder Lynch, if "not devoid of affection," William recalled, "was engrossed by the care of his property." Still "in the garb of mourning," he "embraced the roving, stirring, homeless, comfortless, but attractive life of a sailor."
Signing on as a midshipman, he obtained a berth on U.S.S. Congress, the third naval vessel of that name, a 36-gun sailing frigate that had been launched in 1799 from the Portsmouth shipyard and had seen considerable action against privateers and pirates in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, once under the famed Stephen Decatur, and against British shipping in the War of 1812. Now it was fitted for the long voyage to China, the historic first such cruise of an American warship, with the object of "showing the flag" around the world, protecting merchant shipping, and contributing to diplomatic efforts to solidify ties between Washington and Canton in the still unsettled aftermath of Britain's Opium War.
The Navy had no officers' academy comparable to the Army's at West Point, so midshipmen learned at sea. It would be vivid schooling for young Lynch. Congress sailed for the Azores, where the midshipman took careful notice in his journal of the culture and mores of Madeira, and then for Rio de Janeiro, where evidence of the active Brazilian slave trade horrified this son of Virginia. Then Congress made for the Cape of Good Hope. Java Head and the entrance of the Sunda Strait appeared before them on the 64th day. Stopping briefly over to water at Anjeer, and joining a small mainland-bound convoy of American and British merchant ships, the frigate continued into the China Sea at nearly the height of monsoon season, bearing through a furious typhoon that nearly drove them onto shoals athwart the island of Luzon in the Philippines; at one point the roar of surf was clearly audible. Not until they were nearly in sight of the Ladrons Islands and the city of Canton did the sea subside.
All the way across, Congress was a crowded, floating academy for William Francis Lynch and his young comrades. Midshipmen were officers in training, outranked by all but ordinary sailors, berthed in hammocks down in steerage, on watch much of the day and learning constantly, whether they were supervising sailors on deck or rigging duties, taking gunnery practice, or being tutored by the sailing master in mathematics, navigation, and astronomy, learning what little was understood about tides, currents, and winds. As such, the education was paltry; much of their work was menial, and the natural high spirits of the youths made sustained train of thought difficult.
For several months Congress used an anchorage some 80 miles up the shore from Canton, while its crew mapped and sounded coastal waters — Lynch's diary recorded how happily reminiscent of home were the pine forests and gentle, mist-shrouded hills of mainland China — and then the ship spent six weeks pursuing a rumored but elusive open-sea shoal, with the detailed officers and midshipmen suffering long exposure to the sun while sounding the bottom from boats. Probably it was during this time, given the drills and maneuvers, that Lynch badly injured an ankle while helping to launch a cutter from the frigate. The injury would hamper and pain him for years.
Twice, the frigate sailed to Manila. The first voyage was for replenishing stores as well as seeking better medical care for their swelling sick list, where there were "considerate and attentive" Spanish colonial authorities and competent (for the era) doctors and nurses. The second, however, begun as the first leg of the long return cruise home, took Congress into disaster. In Manila a galloping cholera epidemic was blamed by superstitious Filipinos on the foreign community; mobs burned out and massacred many Westerners, with the colonial army and police restoring order only after great difficulty. By then, Congress had sailed into Manila harbor; its commander had conferred with local authorities about the "sickly airs" they then believed caused cholera; and the ship had filled its tanks with local drinking water. It was infected.
Already resembling a floating hospital, recalled Lynch, with many sailors bedridden with heatstroke, tropical diseases, and injuries, Congress sailed hastily south and west across the China Sea but was rapidly overtaken by the contagion they did not understand, which decimated the weaker sailors but reached even the robust. "Of those who assembled at the evening meal," recalled Lynch of those tense days, "sometimes he, whose manly frame and sanguine temperament seemed to defy the pestilence, would be attacked during the night, and the next morning, sewed up in the hammock in which he had long been rocked to sleep, his bodied awaited the rites of sepulture." Seventy men were dead before the ship reached Java Head and the plague abated.
More trouble was ahead. The ship reached the Cape of Good Hope, but gales prevented it from pausing to take on fresh water, and when Congress neared the island of St. Helena, the commander seriously erred in bypassing the island and not getting water because he was anxious to make a Western port and wanted to take advantage of generous winds. But then they were becalmed in the middle of the South Atlantic. After a week of growing thirst among the crew, scurvy appeared and pervaded. The suffering began to abate with a copious shower and breezes, which then sent them westward toward succor at Rio de Janeiro. When Congress and its crew were replenished, they sailed out of Buenos Aires harbor for the final leg.
Two years away from home — the hard work and tension, the terrible food and too much drink, the storms and unfriendly seas, the fevers and injuries, the numerous deaths — accumulated upon the crew in the ensuing weeks, their anticipation of home port rising, and Congress actually quickened as it neared the Chesapeake, propelled by a stiff breeze.
As Lynch recorded in his journal, "My messmates insist upon it that the Norfolk girls have a tow-rope secured to the ship, and that they are hauling us in with a speed proportioned to their impatience." Congress reached Hampton Roads and anchored against a sunset. Early the next morning it navigated slowly and majestically through the narrow channel toward the Navy yard past the town of Norfolk, with the entire population turned out on docks and wharves to cheer its return from China. William Francis Lynch would never forget the pride and exhilaration, and he keenly looked forward to his next voyage.
His maritime education continued, with the ships on which he served sailing in and out of history, and with the young man who was being formed developing an interesting set of contradictions.
Bookish and well read, religious and philosophical, Lynch had entered an active, dangerous profession in which there were few in the apprentice ranks who shared his interests or passions, and the others of his age who were common seamen were more often than not, he noted, of a loutish or roguish character.
From Virginia, a state that owed its prosperity and its prominence within the American union to the fruits of slave labor, Lynch was at his core a passionate abolitionist, freely expressing his views in the memoir he penned in middle age and published in 1851, the decade so scored by dissension and violence over slavery that overflowed into conflagration in 1861 with the Civil War. Even on his maiden voyage to China in 1819, the year that the U.S. Congress had declared the slave trade to be piracy (it had been forbidden to American shipping since 1808), young Lynch had been revolted by the cruelties he witnessed in Rio de Janeiro. "The slaves so much exceed the freemen in number," he wrote in his journal, "that the police [are] necessarily very strict, and gangs of the poor wretches are compelled to work in chains. The heart sickens at the sight of hordes of these unfortunates, almost in a state of nudity, like driven cattle, exposed for inspection and sale, and this, too, immediately in front of the palace. What a contrast!"
His second voyage heightened his outrage. The schooner Shark left port in August 1821. It was a swift, 200-ton Baltimore clipper, 86 feet long and armed with 12 mounted guns, under the command of Lieutenant Matthew C. Perry, a zealous abolitionist. The mission, after conveying the U.S. minister to the new colony of Liberia, was to interdict slave ships off the African coast. American and British cruisers were hard pressed to make a dent, especially when there were so many other nations who refused to honor the restriction to their commerce. Off the coast of Liberia, they had a memorable encounter when they spied a suspicious ship and gave chase. When "the bow guns were cleared away," Lynch recounted, "and we were calculating how long before they could be brought to bear ... through the spyglass, we were shocked to perceive that gangs of negroes were brought up, placed at the sweeps, and made to labor for the prolongation of their captivity."
That cruelty spurred them, he said, "to renewed exertion." When the enemy schooner was finally overtaken, it proved to be flying French colors and bound for the French West Indies. "The overpowering smell and the sight presented by her slave-deck, can never be obliterated from the memory," Lynch wrote. "In a space of about 15 by 40 feet, and four feet high, between-decks, one hundred and sixty-three negroes, men, women, and children, were ... confined," dovetailed head to feet with children forced to lie atop the adults. "Their bodies were so emaciated, and their black skins were so shrunk upon the facial bones, that in their torpor, they resembled so many Egyptian mummies half-awakened into life. A pint of water and half a pint of rice each, was their daily allowance."
Lynch and all the other midshipmen, and indeed all the junior officers, were astounded when Lieutenant Perry examined the slavers' documents and pronounced that he was powerless to stop them or seize their cargo: France had not yet signed the antislavery pact. They urged their commander to do the right thing, but he said he was hampered by diplomatic and legal restrictions. Not even when the younger officers pledged their own purses to offset any fine to which Lieutenant Perry might be held would he act: his hands were tied, Perry said, and no one felt it more keenly than he. "With feelings which I cannot undertake to express," Lynch wrote, "we saw the schooner fill away and steer to the westward, bearing into life-long captivity the unhappy wretches whom we had inspired with a hope of freedom."
Frustratingly, Shark was soon ordered to the West Indies before they could strike a blow against slavery. American naval interdictions along the African coast would continue until the program was abandoned in 1824 — with ships flying French or Spanish flags off-limits, few efforts could be successful.
Not only were Lynch's political and moral beliefs about slavery an interesting indication of his contrasting nature. There was also the issue of alcoholic spirits, of course a mainstay in most sailors' lives. By the conclusion of his second long voyage, from America to Africa to the West Indies and then up the Atlantic coast to New York, he had begun to see the habit of hard indulgence with a clear eye.
It was bitterest wintertime, and they worked northward above Cape Hatteras against a nor'easter snowstorm. The crew had become accustomed to tropical seas. As schooner Shark neared its destination it was "a pyramid of ice." Moreover, said Lynch, "some of the officers and many of the men were frost-bitten; a few of the latter so severely, that they subsequently lost the use of their feet for life." And there was a moral and also a physiological truth: "The greatest sufferers were those who drank ardent spirits; and those who were strictly temperate, almost to a man escaped. Next to temperance, exercise was the greatest preservative, and he who kept his blood in circulation by constant motion, if it were only marking time, retained the full use of his limbs, while his more indolent watchmates were severely frost-bitten."
A year before in Buenos Aires the inexperienced Lynch, after sampling hard spirits in a big way, found himself with his friends howling at the moon, carousing streets, waking slumberers and shooting out windows of complainers. Now he was seeing the light of cause and effect, and responsibility and sensibility, and trying to improve one's chances of survival. As a mature commander during his life-defining exploit, he would insist that all the men who accompanied him to the Jordan and Dead Sea sign temperance pledges and be of clean and upright character.
Certainly, during Lynch's third sea tour he saw many individuals of an opposite nature: he was posted to the anti-pirate "mosquito flotilla" of Commodore David Porter, plying the waters around St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Cuba. Against a seemingly endless supply of privateers who had the run of the Caribbean and had had a terrible effect against shipping, the Americans had a grab-bag force of small schooners, a steam ferryboat called Seagull, and row-barges named Mosquito, Gnat, Midge, Sandfly, and Gillinipper. Lynch first served on a schooner before volunteering for one of the little barges, which were powered by sail and oar and served by 2 officers, a coxswain, and 16 seamen.
He was soon fully immersed in more action than he had ever seen, as the squadron was sent to fan out across the seas. Barges, including the one on which Lynch served, sailed straight from Key West to the Cuban pirate stronghold of Sagua la Grande, where at daybreak they mounted a strategic attack on shore batteries and several moored schooners. Quickly, the fight moved to hand-to-hand combat with sword and single-shot pistol; it was long and exceptionally bloody, mostly on the side of the pirates, who were cut down at their guns and on deck, or shot as they attempted to swim away.
Within three days his ship found itself along Cuba's northern coast, in pursuit of one of the most dreaded and remorseless bands of privateers. When they saw they would be overrun, the pirates deliberately grounded their ship and melted into the jungle with the Americans unable to stop them.
So passed two years of service in the Indies, in which Lynch took part in uncountable battles and chases under horrid tropical conditions — short water rations, salt-preserved food, sun-blistered, skin-diseased, and attacked by swarms of mosquitoes and sand fleas that "goaded us," wrote Lynch, "almost to madness. It is wonderful how we stood it; and but for the high state of mental excitement, the most powerful constitution must have succumbed. Whether chasing vessel far to seaward, or dragging our boats up some narrow creek, by the jutting roots or overhanging branches of the mangrove, or pushing them, as we waded, across a wide but shallow lagoon, the toil was unceasing, the exposure baneful, and the privation scarce endurable."
At the end of the first year, Commodore Porter ordered his command to congregate at Key West for recuperation, but no sooner had the Navy force gathered than yellow fever struck. "Of that dreadful period," Lynch wrote, "so painful to think of, it would be laceration to the feelings to attempt a recital." But he gave a glimpse of the "dreadful mortality" that had thinned them: his barge had consisted of 2 officers and 17 men, and after three weeks of the epidemic, only 5 survived.
Lynch and the other lucky ones lived to spend another year chasing pirates. But by the end of the campaign under Commodore Porter, they had pushed the number of captured pirate craft to 65, and the extirpation would be all but complete.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bitter Waters"
by .
Copyright © 2011 David Haward Bain.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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