PORTER’S PRIVATE WAR
On the morning of Oct. 25, 1813, the inhabitants of Nuku Hiva—the largest of 15 islands comprising Polynesia’s remote Marquesas—awoke to the startling sight of a six-ship flotilla approaching from the east across the cobalt-blue South Pacific. While the islanders were accustomed to occasional visits by whaling vessels seeking fresh water or shelter from storms, never had so many masts appeared over the horizon at one time.
Though five of the new arrivals appeared nonthreatening, the lead ship was anything but. Significantly larger than its companions, it boasted three tall masts and a row of gunports along either side of a hull painted black as death. Even to the islanders’ untrained eyes the vessel was obviously a warship. The vessel was in fact the frigate USS Essex, but despite the ship’s menacing appearance its captain, 33-year-old David Porter, had not brought his small fleet to remote Nuku Hiva looking for a fight.
He simply needed a place to hide.
Following the outbreak of war between the United States and Britain in June 1812 Essex had captured nearly a dozen British vessels off Bermuda and in the Caribbean. In February 1813, after a return to New York and subsequent voyage down the Atlantic coast of South America, Porter rounded Cape Horn into the Pacific. His intent was to find and either capture or destroy ships of Britain’s wide-ranging whaling fleet, hoping to put a significant dent in the enemy’s economy. Over the next eight months Porter and his crew captured a dozen more enemy vessels and took 360 prisoners, a success that prompted the Royal Navy to send two warships—the 53-gun frigate Phoebe and 28-gun sloop Cherub—after Essex and its attendant flotilla.
But evading British warships was not Porter’s only reason for shaping a course for the Marquesas. After 11 months at sea was in desperate need of an overhaul. Porter needed somewhere to beach the frigate so his crew could scrape its bottom, repaint its hull and effect other repairs. And then there were the rats. They had eaten their way into every corner of the ship, gnawing at water casks and chewing on sail canvas. They had even penetrated the ship’s magazine and eaten cartridges. To smoke the vermin first had to be emptied.
