Soon after the U.S. Navy schooner Grampus arrived in St. Thomas Harbor on 9 August 1822, her commander, Lieutenant Commandant Francis H. Gregory, received disturbing news. Captain John Souther, master of the schooner Coquette, told him that the American merchantman had been plundered at sea a short time before. The Grampus set sail for Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, on 14 August with “two valuable vessels” under her charge, and on the evening of the 15th spotted a hermaphrodite brig “hovering upon our weather quarter.” Gregory had the Grampus remain on course.
Dawn on the 16th revealed the brig still in company, ahead. Gregory ordered the Grampus, a fast sailer, to give chase, and she gained considerably until the brig hoisted British colors at 0930. A half-hour later, the pursued vessel broke out a Spanish ensign and fired a gun to windward. As the distance between the U.S. warship and the brig decreased, the latter hove-to and broke out a white flag from her foremast. Based on the description provided him at St. Thomas only days before, Gregory “perceived her to be the pirate that had fired upon and plundered the Coquette” and “therefore considered it my duty to arrest her.”
He had the Grampus brought to within pistol-shot range, then had her lie-to under the brig’s lee, at which time he hailed her and demanded the ship’s surrender as a pirate. The brig’s crew claimed they didn’t understand the schooner’s commander, prompting him to repeat his demand. As he did so, however, the brig answered with a volley of small-arms and cannon fire. The battle was joined.
The Grampus had been designed by the noted shipbuilder Henry Eckford, a Scot who had immigrated to Canada and then to New York and was largely responsible for building the ships of the U.S. Navy’s Lake Ontario Squadron during the War of 1812. She was one of five schooners constructed under the Navy’s postwar building program; the other four were Porpoise-class schooners designed by William Doughty. Workmen at the Washington Navy Yard lay the Grampus’ keel in 1820 and launched her on 2 August 1821. She had been built—under Doughty’s supervision and at a cost of about $23,600—“to cruise in the West India seas and Gulf of Mexico, for the purpose of repressing piracy and affording effectual protection to the citizens and commerce of the United States,” according to orders given to the commander of the West Indies Squadron.
The Grampus was commissioned later in 1821. Her captain, 33-year-old Lieutenant Francis H. Gregory, had escaped impressment in the Royal Navy, served under Oliver Hazard Perry, battled pirates in the Gulf of Mexico in 1811, and fought with distinction on Lake Ontario until captured by the British in 1814. He proved an excellent choice for a ship’s first commanding officer and would put his stamp on the new man-of-war.
Bullying virtually defenseless merchantmen was one thing, but tangling with a warship of the U.S. Navy—especially one commanded by a man not to be trifled with—was altogether different that August day in 1822. The Grampus cleared for action and quickly returned fire. Gregory’s disciplined tars soon decided the issue. After only three and a half minutes of punishment from the Grampus’s carronades, the brig struck her colors, having received three direct hits “between wind and water” that left her in a sinking condition with one dead and six wounded. The Grampus, by comparison, had “received some trifling injury to her sails and rigging,” Gregory reported, “but not a man hurt.”
The Navy schooner’s quarry proved to be the Palmyra, formerly the Panchita, out of Puerto Rico, armed with a long brass 18-pounder and eight 18-pounder carronades and manned by a crew of 88. Gregory immediately dispatched a boarding party in the Grampus’ boats. Led by Lieutenant Ralph Voorhees, the American sailors scrambled aboard the Palmyra and effected timely damage-control measures that prevented her from foundering. Voorhees would later be praised for his “good conduct and gallantry.”
Upon interrogation, the Palymra’s crewmen acknowledged having plundered the Coquette, but her officers lamely explained “that they could not prevent such things [from] happening now and then.” Her papers showing her to be a privateer had only been a cover for piracy.
The Grampus continued to operate in the West Indies, punctuating that work with occasional periods of repairs and alterations. A little more than two years after she had taken the Palmyra, the schooner, Lieutenant Commandant John D. Sloat in command, figured in a controversial incident that led to the end of Commodore David Porter’s U.S. Navy career. In the wake of the detention of one of his officers who was investigating piracy out of Foxardo (present-day Fajardo), Puerto Rico, Porter sailed to chastise the officials of that port, breaking his broad pennant in the Grampus and arriving at 0800 on 24 November 1824 in company with the schooner Beagle.
Having perceived guns being loaded and trained on his flagship, Porter sent Lieutenant Garrett J. Pendergast and Marines from the Grampus under First Lieutenant of Marines Thomas B. Barton ashore. The party landed behind the guns, quickly “mounted the hill with muskets, pistols and cutlasses,” spiked the cannon, and destroyed their ammunition. While Porter cited what he believed to be sufficient precedent for his actions, the U.S. government condemned the invasion of sovereign Spanish territory and the Navy relieved the commodore of command of the squadron and court-martialed him. Porter resigned in protest and later commanded the Mexican navy.
The Grampus would capture the slaver Fenix off Haiti on 5 June 1830 and later serve off the coast of Africa before she underwent a period of repairs at the Boston Navy Yard. Lieutenant Alfred E. Downes assumed command of the ship on 23 January 1843. Attached to the Home Squadron, the Grampus lay off the bar at Charleston, South Carolina, between 11 and 15 March. Passed Midshipman Isaac S. K. You, who hailed from Charleston, had gone ashore on the 11th to visit his family. He returned aboard on the night of the 14th. Earlier that day, Lieutenant Downes had posted a letter declaring that the ship would be at Norfolk between 8 and 15 April, and You’s relatives assumed they would hear from him when he reached there. When they did not receive word from him, they presumed that the Grampus had received a change of orders before sailing.
Sadly, that had not been case, for the well-traveled schooner, whose service—whether pursuing pirates or slavers—had been so workmanlike for her entire career, disappeared, most likely the victim of “some of the severe gales which occurred about that time” off Charleston. Not a man or boy survived the Grampus’ loss to recount the manner in which she met her end. Such was her legacy, however, that five more ships of the U.S. Navy carried her name well into the 20th century. The fifth Grampus, a submarine (SS-207), received three battle stars for successful World War II patrols but was lost with all hands in early 1943, a century after her namesake ship had gone down.
Grampus-class Schooner
Tonnage: 172
Length: 97 feet (overall)
Beam: 23 feet, 6 inches
Depth of Hold: 9 feet, 6 inches
Battery: 1 18-pounder pivot gun, 10 12-pounder carronades
Complement: 64 officers, enlisted men, and Marines