At the end of January 1814, the naval hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, Oliver Hazard Perry, arrived in Baltimore for a round of celebrations. On his last night in town, the Baltimore grandees feted Perry at an elegant dinner at the Fountain Inn, complete with a painted- screen panorama of his great victory. At a reception afterwards at the home of a prominent merchant, John Hollins, the host called in his 14-year-old son, George, to meet the 29-year-old captain. Mr. Hollins asked Perry what kind of midshipman young George would make. Perry looked the boy over, said “first rate,” and with that, Mr. Hollins could only bid his son to ask his mother for permission to join the Navy. Janet Smith Hollins burst into tears and begged George not to go to sea, which already had claimed the life of George’s brother William. But her tears were to no avail. The next day, 2 February 1814, John Hollins wrote the Secretary of the Navy requesting a midshipman’s warrant for his son.
George Hollins was not simply a boy with wealthy parents who wished to wear the uniform. One uncle, Samuel Smith, was a U.S. Senator from Maryland. Another uncle, Robert Smith, was a former Secretary of the Navy (under Thomas Jefferson) and a former Secretary of State (under James Madison). And four years earlier, after a few desultory years at school in Baltimore, the Hollinses had packed George off to Albemarle County, Virginia, for tutoring by another uncle, Peter Carr, an intimate friend and neighbor of the Sage of Monticello. Small wonder, then, that George Hollins recalled years later that he received his midshipman warrant by return mail, with orders to report to the new sloop-of-war Erie, then lying at Fell’s Point in Baltimore harbor. But the Erie could not get out of the harbor, much less to sea, with British warships in control of the Chesapeake Bay. In December 1814, the Navy ordered Midshipman Hollins to New York for duty on board the frigate President, under the command of Commodore Stephen Decatur. Hollins, one of 15 midshipmen on board, was assigned to a division of guns on the gun deck.
If the President could break through the British Navy blockade, she could outrun anything she could not outfight, and, with her armament of 30 24-pounder cannon and 20 42-pounder short-range carronades, she could outfight anything less than a ship-of-the-line. Decatur’s orders called for him to sail the President into the Indian Ocean to destroy Britain’s East India trade. Although a powerful Royal Navy squadron patrolled off Sandy Hook in January 1815, a northwesterly winter storm had blown the British blockading ships out to who knew where. Decatur resolved to roll the dice and try to get to sea.
On 14 January, the President, which had dropped down from the East River to lay off Staten Island, cast off her moorings and sailed to Sandy Hook Bay, where she anchored. By prior plan, three Navy gunboats sailed out and anchored in a row to mark the line of the bar. As the tide came in, there should have been sufficient depth for the President to clear the bar and pass to the open ocean. No British topsails were in sight. Like a runner moving to the starting blocks, the President lifted her anchors and sailed closer to the three gunboats. Then disaster struck. At around 1830, just as the frigate let go her anchor again to stop near the lead gunboat, the President struck on the bar as she “rounded to.” Decatur immediately ordered the anchor cable cut and the fore and mizzen topsails sheeted home to try to shoot the ship over the bar, but the effort to force her over failed miserably. The President began to “thump” on the bar, pounding her keel as each incoming wave lifted her slightly and set her down with a bang.
Decatur then tried to lighten the President to float her back. In rapid succession, he ordered another anchor let go, the topsails taken in and furled, the royal yards sent down (to lessen weight aloft), and some of the massive 24-pounder cannon on the gun deck rolled forward to put the ship on an even keel. Those maneuvers failed, too. To the mortification of every American, the President continued, in the words of Lieutenant John Shubrick, to “thump very heavily on the Bar till about 8 o’clock, the violence of her shocks decreasing as the tide rose.” For more than two hours she wallowed on the bar, the shock palpable to every man and boy on board. Finally, by 2030 or 2100 that night, the President passed over the bar. Shubrick noted that she was “touching as she went over.” The keel of the frigate, as her officers learned later, was hogged (made into an arch-like form) and twisted by the pounding on the bar, and what had been the fastest U.S. frigate had been turned into a sluggard.
There was nothing Decatur could do. The strong wind from the northwest prevented him from turning back to New York, and the frigate had crossed the bar with the tide ebbing and a heavy swell rising. He had to go to sea, twisted keel or not. As Hollins wrote, the President could not return “nor could we remain where we were until morning as John Bull could have seen us.” The course Decatur set was not south—the direct path to the open Atlantic—but east-by-north, to sail close by the Long Island shore and bypass where he expected the British to be. After six hours on that course—the commodore believed they had sailed about 50 miles—Decatur ordered the President to bear to the southeast at a little after 0300 on 15 January.
At 0500, the President’s lookouts spotted two sails ahead, and even though the U.S. frigate managed to pass them to windward undetected, an hour later the strangers discovered the President and one of them fired a blue rocket. As the bleak winter sun rose, Decatur found the entire British blockading squadron astern of him: the Majestic, a 56-gun razee (from the French for “cut down,” meaning a ship- of-the-line with a gun deck stripped to add to her speed); three frigates, the 40-gun Endymion and the 38-gun Pomone and Tenedos; and the brig Dispatch. So close were the British ships that, at daylight, the lead British ship opened fire to test the range. The Majestic’s cannonball splashed into the sea only a quarter-mile astern of the President.
Running away in a heavily laden ship with a twisted keel was a difficult task. Decatur ordered the watch aloft to wet the sails to better catch the breeze. Pumps brought frigid North Atlantic salt water, which the topmen tossed by the bucket on every sail, all the way up the 120 feet to the royals. Decatur ordered his lieutenants to lighten the ship further. The crew cut away more anchors, and tossed over the side the ship’s boats, spare spars, cannonballs, and barrels of food. In the course of the morning the wind began to abate, and the President fared no better relative to the British ships at her heels.
The Endymion, which had been in the pack of the British squadron, took the lead in the chase. Slowly but steadily she gained on the larger U.S. vessel. By 1300, the Endymion had closed enough to try the range with her bow chasers. The President riposted with her own stern guns, but the British frigate advanced inexorably, with her consorts lagging only slightly behind. At 1700, the Endymion had, in Decatur’s words, “obtained a position on our starboard quarter, within half point blank shot on which neither our stem nor quarter guns could bear.” The Endymion began to rake the President, as the British ship yawed one way and then the other before the wind. Midshipman Hollins recalled the Endymion “sheering & raking us first one broadside & then the other was poured into us.”
The President limped on, continuing her escape. To have changed course from anything directly away from the British fleet meant the pursuers would have closed the gap more rapidly. But the situation grew intolerable. Decatur’s officers and sailors on the spar deck, exposed to the full force of enemy fire, began to be torn apart, and the rigging and sails became riddled with shot holes and tears. Decatur had his bo’suns whistle for all hands to muster on deck. The scene was dramatic: one glance past their commodore, the crew beheld the Endymion yawing astern and the other enemies behind her in plain view. Decatur had formed a plan. If the Endymion sheered close enough, he told his crew, the Americans would board—every last man and boy. They would sweep over the British ship, take her, set fire to their own, and make good their escape. It was an audacious idea, reminiscent of John Paul Jones’s swapping of his own sinking Bon Homme Richard for HMS Serapis in 1778. Hollins recalled Decatur’s last words: they would carry the British frigate and her crew and “leave them the ashes of the President to take care of; now go to your quarters.” Hollins, however, returned to his gun section nearly in tears, telling another midshipman, “I shall never be able to climb aboard: a little fellow like me.” A huge old quartermaster of his section overheard this and consoled him by saying, “Never mind, Mr. Hollins. You hold on to my jacket &. I’ll take you aboard. We’re not going to leave you here.”
Captain Henry Hope of the Endymion “made a close sheer & we attempted to board,” Hollins recalled, but the maneuver failed. It was then dusk; the President took the covers off her battle lanterns. Having missed the chance to board, the President would try to crush her pursuer. Decatur recounted that he “determined to alter my course south, for the purpose of bringing the enemy abeam, and although their ships astern were drawing up fast, I felt satisfied that I should be enabled to throw him out of the combat before they could come up, and was not without hopes, if the night proved dark . . . that I might still be enabled to effect my escape.” The two ships came abreast, and the President went one-on-one with the Endymion. A dozen U.S. salvos shattered the Endymion’s topsides. The British frigate ceased firing and dropped astern rapidly, her masts and rigging crippled temporarily.
Decatur could not tarry; the other British ships were almost within gunshot. The President turned back to her former course, exposing her stern to the Endymion for half an hour, but “such was his state,” according to Decatur, that “she [sic] did not fire a gun.” Hollins remembered that the wind, which had become lighter throughout the day, seem to have been killed by the cannonade. At 2230, Hollins’s division was called on deck to repair the frigate’s rigging. Hollins was on the quarterdeck, and from the light cast from the - binnacle he saw a man who had been cut in two. “With a feeling of horror I stood looking at the poor fellow’s remains,” he recalled, when a hand gripped his shoulder and the commodore’s voice said, ‘“Young gentleman, have you nothing else to do than to be looking at such things[;] go and attend to your duty.’” The President struggled along until 2300, when the Pomone opened fire off the President's port bow, and the Tenedos was only two cable lengths (1,200 feet) astern. Decatur reported that, with one-fifth of his crew down, “my ship crippled, and more than a fourfold force opposed to me, without a chance of escape left, I deemed it my duty to surrender.” In the darkness, the British let loose a few extra broadsides before realizing that the Americans had given up. Decatur then offered his sword to the commander of the British squadron in the Majestic.
So ended the last cruise of the President. Hollins survived unscathed, but 80 of his shipmates had been killed or wounded—three of the five lieutenants were dead. The British took their prize and prisoners to Bermuda. Teenager that he was, Hollins did not dwell on the death and destruction. He recalled fondly the weeks spent frolicking in Bermuda, where he lived in what he termed a haunted house with the other captured midshipman, who all gave their parole not to fight against the British until exchanged. Word soon came of peace, however, and Hollins found passage to New York.
Because of his youth, Hollins was one of only two midshipmen not called to testify at the court of inquiry called in April 1815 to investigate the loss of the President. After four days of testimony, the court exonerated Decatur, whom the Secretary of the Navy ordered immediately to the Mediterranean. Hollins shipped off with Decatur to fight the Barbary pirates, and then stayed in the peacetime Navy, rising to captain. Nearly a half-century after he served in the President, Hollins reacted to the crisis of 1861 by going South, and in 1862, he commanded Southern naval forces on the Mississippi. After the war, he returned to Baltimore, where he was appointed a bailiff in the city court. Living in retirement, George Hollins jotted down a lifetime of memories in a notebook; even 50 years later, he could not forget that first day at sea.
Sources
Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), vol. 5, p. 152 (entry of George N. Hollins, 1799-1878).
Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Life of Stephen Decatur (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846).
Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland, Winder Family Papers, MS 2310, Notebook of George N. Hollins, undated [ca. 1866].
National Archives, Washington, DC, Record Group 45, M273, “Records of General Courts Martial and Courts of Inquiry of the Navy Department, 1799-1867,” roll 8, case no. 212, court of inquiry on Commodore Stephen Decatur, 11-14 April 1815.
Niles Weekly Register, vol. 8, no. 1 (4 March 1815).