Her captain, Michel-Pierre Barreaut, called for his glass, went aloft, and stood on the foretopsail yard to have a look at his pursuer. That she was a frigate, the Frenchman had no doubt. What he did not yet know was whether the pursuer was American or English. In either case, he had no intention of closing with her, and every intention of avoiding an engagement even if it required him to flee. The French were numerically inferior in the West Indies and their priority was to preserve what naval force they had on the station. A frigate could do more for France’s cause by destroying enemy commerce than by engaging an enemy man-of-war.
An hour after hauling off in chase, Constellation had closed to within signaling distance. Truxtun ordered his signal officer to make the British private signal: blue flag at the fore topmast and a red, white, and blue flag at the main topmast. To this the unidentified frigate made no answer, but ran the American ensign up to the mizzen peak. Constellation made the private signal for the U.S. Navy. Again there was no response.
Truxtun ordered the Constellation cleared for action and the bosun beat to quarters. As if to respond, L’Insurgente lowered the American colors, raised the Tricolor, and fired a shot to windward in affirmation.
The bosun’s whistle sounded and the frigate came alive with the sounds of men scampering to their stations. Muskets, pikes, hatchets, and blunderbusses were served out to the men in the waist. Hammocks were brought up from the berth deck and stacked in the nettings to raise the bulwarks. Marines and topmen leapt into the shrouds and went up the ratlines to the tops. The carpenter and his mates swept away the bulkheads on the gun deck to make a clean sweep, fore and aft. Gun crews gathered around their weapons, and the captains stood by with their handspikes.
L’Insurgente initially stood to the northwest to fetch the passage between St. Kitts and Saba. But now the Frenchman bore up and sailed close-hauled, eight points free of the wind on a starboard tack, perhaps hoping to gain the weather gauge—that is, engage the enemy from windward—and thus an advantage in battle. Constellation, passing south of the shoals off the south headland of Nevis, shaped a course to cut her off. It would be a long, grueling chase.
Though the wind was coming up, Truxtun ordered his crew to make all sail in chase, and a “crowd of canvas was then spread on the Constellation.” Truxtun was driving the frigate to the very limit; pressed heavily with sail in the stiffening breeze, she could easily have carried away a spar. One can imagine the Constellation tearing through the water with the wind on her beam; the foam surging back along the lee rail in a deep, plunging run; the spray thrown up at the bows and into the faces of the foremast jacks; the top yards flexing visibly under the strain; the audible hum of the rigging.
Constellation was gaining on the chase, but the wind was rising steadily and the sky took on an ominous, hazy texture. To windward was the characteristic low-lying bank of thick, ugly clouds, moving rapidly over a mottled sea, that every seamen recognized as the immediate prelude to a squall. Each captain was forced to choose whether to shorten sail and risk losing headway or to keep up a full press of canvas and risk carrying away a mast or spar, which would likely bring the chase to an end. It was a test of the strength of each ship’s rigging, as well as a test of seamanship for the respective crews. Pursuer and prey each kept up a press of sail, their captains hoping for the best.
As the wall of wind and rain enveloped the Constellation, she lurched violently to leeward. All hands let fly all the sheets, and the din of flapping canvas was added to the roar of the squall. All the masts and spars survived except one—the studding sail boom, which carried away with (as one of her crew later said) “such a cracking and snapping [as] I never heard before.” But if a spar had to be lost, better a boom than a topmast or a yard. As the squall passed over, the crew of the Constellation sheeted home her sails and the frigate resumed tearing through the warm Caribbean water “like a race horse.”
Some distance ahead, the squall also closed over L’Insurgente. Barreaut ordered the crew to take in her topgallants, but as the men were out on the yards, a wall of wind struck the ship and the main topmast snapped by the cap and came down, covering the deck with a tangled mass of spars, rigging, and sails. The crew raced with cutlasses and axes to clear away the wreckage. It was a devastating loss, and Barreaut understood that his ship now had almost no hope of escape. At first he attempted to bear away and run for the safety of St. Eustatius, but then hauled his wind and stood on a starboard tack, eight points off the wind, waiting for the Constellation to range up. Barreaut later told his government that the loss of the topmast was the “sole source of our misfortunes.”
As Constellation closed the gap with the fleeing L’Insurgente, the great weight of her 24-pounder guns caused her to heel excessively to leeward. To keep his ship upright, Truxtun was forced to run out the windward guns and keep the leeward guns housed behind closed ports. Here was a dramatic proof of the dangers of overarming. The Constellation held the weather gauge—could engage the enemy from windward—and tactical doctrine dictated that Truxtun must conserve this valuable advantage. Yet, doing so would require him to bring his leeward battery into action. With the Constellation a cable length astern of the French vessel, Truxtun decided to surrender the weather gauge by crossing the Insurgente’s wake and running under her lee.
At a quarter past three, with the two frigates a few leagues west of Nevis, the Constellation closed to within pistol-shot range. The French captain was plainly visible now at L’Insurgente’s taffrail, shouting for a parlay. For once in his life Truxtun had nothing to say, and he refused even to reply. In his mind it was evident that a state of war existed between America and France, even if undeclared. Licensed French privateers were hunting American merchantmen throughout these waters, and French men-of-war had captured American men-of-war. L’Insurgente could either fight or strike her colors; there would be no discussion and no negotiation. When the aftermost gun on the Constellation could bear on the enemy, Truxtun gave the order for the starboard guns to fire in rotation.
The 24-pounders fired, one by one, forward to aft; each jumped, made a stabbing flash of light, and expelled a cloud of thick, white smoke that was instantly carried away by the wind. The American gun crews fired their cannon in the English fashion, directly into L’Insurgente’s hull. They were double-shotted, and wrought terrible devastation, killing or wounding perhaps a score of Frenchmen in the first half-minute of the engagement.
L’Insurgente at once responded with a broadside of her own, firing up at the Constellation’s masts and rigging. The fore topmast was struck just above the cap, and seemed to teeter on the verge of coming down. An eighteen-year-old midshipman named David Porter, stationed in the foretop with the marines and small arms men, attempted to hail the deck. Unable to get Truxtun’s attention over the clamor of the battle, he climbed up and cut away the slings, allowing the yards to fall and removing pressure from the injured mast, which was saved.
L’Insurgente’s decks were littered with dead and dying men, and her officers seemed to be losing control of the remaining crew. Many of them ran from their guns, some even rushing into the captain’s cabin. Barreaut, perhaps sensing that his vessel was outgunned, called for boarders and ordered the helmsman to run aboard the Constellation. But his ship was losing way, and the maneuver failed. It was a costly failure, for it allowed the Constellation to range ahead, cross the Frenchman’s bows, and fire a ferocious, double-shotted, raking broadside. The Constellation passed to windward of the traumatized Insurgente and wore round on a parallel course. The gun crews of both ships ran across their respective decks to serve the guns on the other side. Constellation’s larboard gunports swung open, the muzzles ran out, blazed, roared, and vanished behind a curtain of smoke. L’Insurgente’s starboard battery answered, and now the two frigates hauled close to the wind and fought a running battle, trading ball for ball.
On Constellation’s gun deck, a member of one of the gun crews was overcome with panic and ran from his gun. The l
ieutenant who commanded his division was Andrew Sterrett, a twenty-one-year-old native of Baltimore. Sterrett drew his sword, chased the terrified man through the ship, cornered him, and killed him. He later boasted to his brother: “One fellow I was obliged to run through the body with my sword, and so put an end to a coward. You must not think this strange, for we would put a man to death for even looking pale on board this ship.”
One of the Constellation’s 24-pound balls smashed through L’Insurgente’s hull, dismounting a gun, damaging the carriage of a second gun, and killing several men. According to an account published shortly after the battle in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, the spent ball rolled along the gun deck until it was stopped and picked up by a French officer, who took it as proof that L’Insurgente, with her 12-pounders, was outgunned, and carried the ball aft to show to Barreaut.
For a time, the two ships drew apart. The French sailors were set to work re-reeving the running lines that had been cut by the Constellation’s fire. The American frigate had suffered little damage, and at a few minutes after four in the afternoon, Truxtun maneuvered the ship into a position directly athwart L’Insurgente’s stern, setting up another raking broadside. Constellation, said John Rodgers, “should certainly have sent her to the infernal regions had we fired whilst in that position.”
Barreaut had to admit that his ship was in a pitiful state. The main topgallant sail had fallen over the maintop, and was now draped like a veil over the men stationed there. The spanker was “completely riddled and torn,” and Barreaut ordered his men to lower it in order to relieve the wounded mizzenmast. The main and mizzen topmasts had been shot away, and now lay uselessly across the deck. Several of the cannon had been dismounted. The braces and bowlines of the foresails were cut to pieces, and innumerable rope ends hung limp from aloft and trailed in the sea. His casualties were heavy: scores of dead and wounded were strewn along the decks and rivulets of blood were running in the seams between the deck planks. The bosun was not on deck, nor any of the petty officers; the captain could see only one man left standing in the forecastle.
Looking across at the Constellation, Barreaut saw a ship that appeared largely intact. She had a few minor injuries—her rigging was shot up, she had lost a foremast yard, and there were holes in her sails where balls had passed through—but she could maneuver properly and her guns were still well manned. Though he could have fought on, Barreaut later said, “sooner or later, in my position, I should have to strike to a superior force.” L’Insurgente was, he said, “totally unrigged…a hulk, having for her entire defense a battery of 12’s.” He went forward over the gangway and told his first lieutenant he intended to surrender the ship. The lieutenant answered: “Do as you will.” At a quarter past four in the afternoon, the Tricolor was hauled down from the mizzen peak.
On the quarterdeck of the Constellation, Truxtun summoned Lieutenant Rodgers and ordered him to gather a prize crew of one midshipman and eleven seamen. A boat was lowered and the party was rowed across. As Rodgers came up over the side to take possession of the captured ship, he was privately thrilled by the sight of the carnage the enemy had suffered. “Although I would not have you think me bloody minded,” the bloody-minded lieutenant wrote Stoddert, “yet I must confess the most gratifying sight my eyes ever beheld was seventy French pirates (you know I have just cause to call them such) wallowing in their gore, twenty-nine of whom were killed and forty-one wounded.”
Barreaut and his first lieutenant were sent across to the Constellation. The French captain hoped to have possession of the defeated frigate restored to him. Although he was certainly aware of the intense privateering campaign carried on by French West Indian colonies against American commerce, he also knew that war had never been declared by either nation. As he came up over the Constellation’s side, he said to Truxtun: “Our nations are not at war. Why have you fired on our national flag?” Truxtun’s attention was on the challenge of managing two disabled frigates and several hundred prisoners in strong winds with night coming on, and he refused to enter into a debate. He asked Barreaut’s name and the name of the captured ship, and then said: “You, sir, are my prisoner.” Barreaut and the lieutenant were stripped of their side arms and sent below.
Three of the Constellation’s topmen had been hit by cannon or small arms fire. One was killed outright, and a second died later of his wounds. The fourth casualty was Neil Harvey, the man Lieutenant Sterrett had executed for running from his gun. “I send you a list of the killed and wounded on board the Constellation,” wrote Midshipman Porter to his father; “in the foretop, John Andrews, shot through both of his legs—George Water, back broke by the wind of a cannon ball—Samuel Wilson, leg shot off, died of his wound—one man killed for cowardice.”
In the hours after the action, the wind continued to rise. It was deemed too dangerous to ferry the L’Insurgente’s prisoners and casualties across a heaving sea in the rapidly oncoming darkness, so Rodgers and his small prize crew were obliged to navigate the jury-rigged frigate back to St. Kitts with 173 prisoners in the hold. There was not even enough time to deal with the dead. The bodies were left on deck wherever they had fallen. The gratings that would otherwise have been lashed down over the hatches had been thrown over the side by the prisoners, so a man had to stand guard over each of the hatchways, armed with a blunderbuss, a cutlass, and a brace of pistols, “with orders to fire, if any of the prisoners should attempt to come upon deck, without having previously obtained his permission.”
Sailing for two days and three nights into the teeth of gale-force winds, L’Insurgente was finally brought to anchor under the guns of Bluff Point, at the northern end of Basseterre Roads. If the English colonists in the town had wondered at the identity of this unfamiliar frigate, a glance through a long glass would have answered the question: an American ensign flew above the Tricolor at the mizzen peak.
CAPTAIN BARREAUT TOLD TRUXTUN that the diplomatic consequences of the battle would be severe. When the news reached Paris, he said, the French government would issue a declaration of war. Truxtun pointed out that L’Insurgente had herself taken part in the capture of the American naval schooner Retaliation a few months earlier; that L’Insurgente’s own logbook proved she had seized several American merchant vessels; and that his orders, in any case, instructed him to attack any French armed ship he met at sea. “The french Captain tells me, I have caused a War with France,” Truxtun wrote Stoddert. “If so I am glad of it, for I detest Things being done by Halves.”
The new governor of Guadaloupe, General Etienne Desfourneaux, adopted the same tone of shock and indignation. Communicating with St. Kitts by a vessel dispatched under a flag of truce, the governor demanded, “in the name of the Republic,” the return of L’Insurgente and her crew. Replying two days later, Truxtun rejected the demand, and declared that he would continue to attack any French armed ship he found operating in the West Indies, “untill ordered to the Contrary by the President of the United States.” The American people, Truxtun added, “wish Peace with France and all the World on fair and honorable Terms, but on any Other we disdain it. Yes Sir, we spurn at the Idea.”
Truxtun proposed a prisoner exchange, but Desfourneaux flatly denied that there were any imprisoned Americans on Guadaloupe, an assertion he must certainly have known to be false. The governor’s refusal posed a dilemma, because the small American squadron did not have the means to provide for the prisoners taken in L’Insurgente. Truxtun solved the problem by transferring the French seamen to English jails on St. Kitts, and allowed the fifty-two French officers to sail in a cartel to Guadaloupe, each having signed a parole agreement pledging not to “take up Arms against the…U. S. of America by Sea or Land.” Though Captain Barreaut had protested the taking of his ship, he was grateful for the humane treatment he and his fellow prisoners received. “You have united the two Qualities which characterize a Man of Honor—Courage and Humanity,” he wrote Truxtun. “Receive from me the most Sincere Thanks, and be assured, I
shall make it a Duty to publish to all my fellow Citizens the generous Conduct which you have observed towards us.” Barreaut presented Truxtun with a plume from his hat, which the American commodore in turn gave to his nephew as a gift.
Lieutenant Rodgers was promoted to the rank of acting captain of L’Insurgente, pending the Navy Department’s approval. Throughout February and early March 1799, he supervised repairs to the damaged ship, abiding by the commodore’s wishes to “be as frugal as possible in the Outfit.” According to the navy’s prize regulations, every officer and seaman of the Constellation would receive a share of her value, and Truxtun suspected that the government might deduct the cost of repairs. Thirty-one officers and seamen were transferred from the Constellation to L’Insurgente. With additional men from other vessels in the squadron, her crew would amount to 124, less than a third of her complement—there would be enough hands to navigate the ship home, but not enough to defend her against an opponent of comparable size. For safety, the two frigates would sail to North America in company.
Barry and the United States returned home in early April, leaving the Leeward Island passages largely undefended. With American merchant vessels arriving in the West Indies in ever greater numbers, Truxtun felt it was necessary for the Constellation and her consorts to remain in the south as long as possible, but the squadron was running short of stores and provisions, and the one-year enlistments of the Constellation’s crew were expiring. By May 7, having received no new orders from Stoddert, the commodore concluded that he had no choice but to sail. After a quiet two-week passage, the Constellation and L’Insurgente both arrived in Hampton Roads on the afternoon of Monday, May 20, anchoring in the bight of Craney Island. Truxtun ordered Rodgers to hoist the French Tricolor beneath the American flag at L’Insurgente’s mizzen peak, “and gratify our Countrymen with that Sight for three Days.”