James Tertius De Kay - The Battle of Stonington: Torpedoes, Submarines, and Rockets in the War of 1812

The Battle of Stonington

The Battle of Stonington (greatly enlarged) from an English commemorative water jug. Although the depiction is fanciful in many details, the general sense of the action, including the attempted landing on the east side of the village (at top), is accurate. The complete water jug is shown at the end of the text. (Author)

This book has been brought to publication by the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest. First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published 2012.

ISBN 978-1-61251-257-0

1990

by the United States Naval Institute

Annapolis, Maryland

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

The photograph on page 130 is Crown copyright: Public Record Office, London: ADM 1/4369.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Kay, James Tertius.

The Battle of Stonington : torpedoes, submarines, and rockets in the War of 1812 / James Tertius de Kay.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-87021-279-6

1. Stonington (Conn.)HistoryBombardment, 1814. I. Title.

E356.S8D4 1990

First printing

17 16 15 14 13 6 5 4 3 2

To

FRANK LYNCH

(191487)

Captain, United States Navy

He is the keel and rudder
of this book.

This book could never have been written without the painstaking research of the late Frank Lynch. Working over a number of years in both Britain and the United States, he searched through the densely packed captains letter boxes at the University of Hull, the National Library of Scotland, the Public Record Office at Kew, and the Library of Congress; traced with patient scholarship the Byzantine trail of the Stewarts quest for a pension; charted the vagaries of the Connecticut militia; and finally assembled on computer disc and microfilm his rich collection of naval correspondence concerning the War of 1812 in general and the Battle of Stonington in particular.

My own interest in the battle developed years after most of Franks work was completed. My curiosity was piqued by the strange outcome of the battle, and later when I read Captain Hardys singular letter of 10 August 1814 (see page 161), I was hooked. Torpedoes? I wondered. Mrs. Stewart? I poked around through local libraries for answers, and in the process discovered that Frank Lynch, a retired naval officer living in Stonington, was a leading authority on the battle and had written a comprehensive piece on it for the 150th anniversary of the event in 1964. Frank shared his research with me, and eventually we began considering the possibility of writing a book on the subject.

And then in the fall of 1987 Frank Lynch died. Since then his widow, Emily, has been as generous with her time and help as Frank was and has allowed me continued access to the wealth of material Frank amassed.

I have had help from many other quarters as well. Anthony Bailey, the novelist, memoirist, New Yorker writer, yachtsman, and sometime neighbor, painstakingly went through an earlier draft to exorcise the mangled nautical terminology of a writer who barely knows the difference between a halyard and a trunnion. Mary Thacher, burrowing in the National Archives, came up with an invaluable collection of cartographical material, including Hardys own chart of the eastern end of Long Island Sound and the only map of Stonington I have ever seen that includes the location of the fort. Victor Taliaferro Boatwright, who has a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of the wooden navies of the world, provided guidance in many areas, particularly concerning the early history of submarines. Linda M. Maloney, the biographer of Isaac Hull, was helpful in a hundred waysliterallymost notably by providing a reasonable motive for Decaturs attempted kidnapping of Hardy. Rollie McKenna, another neighbor, went out of her way to help me locate rare photographs.

I would also like to thank various institutions for their valuable help: the staff of the G. W. Blunt White Library at the Mystic Seaport Museum, and particularly Bill Peterson, who established for me the authority of the Frederick Denison articles in the 1859 Mystic Pioneer; the Stonington Free Library and its chief librarian, Ann Gray; the Nautilus Memorial Submarine Force Library & Museum in Groton, Connecticut, and archivist Theresa M. Cass; the New-York Historical Society Library, which I discovered only by chance has one of the great naval research collections in the nation; the Old Lighthouse Museum in Stonington, and especially its curator Louise Pittaway; and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London, and the helpful people administering its magnificent picture collection.

I owe a very special thanks to George Lord for providing me with information on his ancestor William Lord, as well as for his helpful introduction to the Beineke Library at Yale, where Hardys letters to Stonington reside. Other special thanks go to Dan Jones, for helping locate Hardy at Block Island a month before I thought he got there, and to Peter M. Coy, for supplying proof in the form of a spys letter.

Many people in Stonington have been helpful, and of these I would particularly want to single out Margaret Davol and the late Robert Newman, whose encouragement at different times was crucial to the completion of this little book.

There are no words to express my love and appreciation of my wife, Belinda, and daughter, Kate, for the innumerable times they cheered me out of a writers block and general sullenness, and whose good spirits and intelligent criticism made this project so much fun.

Stonington
April 1990

A Note on the Text

All spelling and punctuation in quoted extracts is faithful to the original sources.

The Battle of Stonington

The British attack in briefthe curious outcome of the battlethe action seen as a part of the Battle of Long Island Sound