Ship's Carpenter USS Essex

Elias Blood was born in Boston, the illegitimate son of a sailor and a lady’s maid. Brought up with little education, he taught himself to read, and, when he went for a ship’s boy at the age of 12, he fell in with a ship’s carpenter who taught him basic mathematics and then the rest of what carpenters had to know along with the practical skills of handling a brace, a hammer, a plane, and eventually, the various chisels and saws proper to joinery. By the time he was 17, Blood ranked as a carpenter’s mate, and a good one, on the cusp of becoming head carpenter on a ship like Essex, the frigate he shipped on in June of 1812. Essex was part of that cohort of ships that included The Constitution and The United States but she was a bit smaller and a bit slower, financed by subscription rather than by the new government. Once she was part of The Navy, The Navy Department decided—for reasons Captain David Porter could never fathom--to arm her with very heavy but short-range cannons. These were fine for close combat in the style of larger ships of the line, and in-close made Essex the equal of a much larger warship. These heavy guns, these cannonades, however, were an odd armament for a fast frigate, and David Porter cursed the navy daily during gunnery practice as he watched the heavy shot landing less than 200 yards away. And so when Essex was run down by HMS Phoebe and HMS Cherub off of Valparaiso, Chile, all the British warships had to do 8 was to lie at a distance and reduce the American ship to a hulk. Captain Porter ran mad. He carried courage way past sane limits, ordering his men to fight to the death— and they on a ship that was falling apart and whose guns could not even reach its opponent anyway—as they carried him, wounded, below. It was the youngest officer on the ship, a boy midshipman named David Farragut, who finally had the sense to surrender. The surviving crew, after months in a prison hulk in England, were exchanged for British prisoners, and Blood found a berth as carpenter on a fast American privateer, The Chasseur, captained by the clever Thomas Prescott. That ship had an extraordinary run in capturing enemy merchant ships, and Blood profited even though his share of prize money was a relatively meager one. Late in the war, however, Chasseur made a rare capture.

© Peter Grudin, 2015