Toll writes that he was inspired to undertake "Six Frigates" by reading Patrick O'Brian's acclaimed novels, particularly "The Fortunes of War" with its fictionalized account of the Constitution-Java action. He does not write that a ship headed offshore, but that it, the Chesapeake, "doubled Cape Henry and steered into the offing, dead east on the compass." He quotes from piloting guides, considers the frigates' sailing abilities, and remarks on spring fogs in Massachusetts Bay - an "obsidian murk," Toll calls them in a phrase that will resonate with local sailors.
Toll notes the political irony that the navy, strongly supported by the Yankee Federalists, achieved its great glories in the war they hated to the point of meeting, at the Hartford Convention, to debate secession from the Union.īut the great pleasure here is in the splendid writing about ships at sea for which Toll, who has sailed Solings and J-24s and cruised the New England coast, has an instinctive feel. The six had been commissioned to counter the threat to the young nation's maritime commerce from former ally France and the pirate states of the Mediterranean.Īfter President John Adams's aggressive projection of American naval power, his successor, Thomas Jefferson, considered mothballing the frigates and replacing them with shore-patrolling gunboats, an ill-advised policy blocked by the Federalists and New England Republicans in Congress. Toll steers his readers handily through matters of policy and politics.
The six frigates of Toll's title were the Constitution Congress, Constellation, and United States, all broken up in the 1840s and 50s and Chesapeake and President, both lost in stunning defeats by the British - the Chesapeake in a single ship duel under the eyes of eager spectators from the headlands of Cape Ann and Cape Cod. "Nothing chases, nothing intercepts, nothing engages them, but to yield them triumph," lamented the London Pilot. When two more British frigates were lost to the Americans within the next four months - Java to the Constitution in October, and Macedonian to the United States in December - and some 500 merchantmen taken by year's end, the British reaction was shock and dismay. Toll recounts the event in "Six Frigates," the boat men hailed other boats "and the victory passed along till it reached the shore, and then spread like wildfire." And as the ship entered the harbor, "the roar of artillery mingled with the sound of church bells swinging in their belfries, as the news passed from mouth to mouth." As the frigate Constitution approached Boston Light in August 1812, crewmen standing at its rails hailed a small boat sailing nearby, shouting the news that it had defeated the British frigate Guerrière.Īs Ian W.
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