December 21, 2006
War and Honor II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST Fredric Smoler’s thoughtful post on war and honor—with which I entirely agree—reminded me of an incident in the War of 1812. I have not seen Mr. Toll’s book so I don’t know if he refers to it.
Sailing from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 5, 1813, Lt. William Burrows, in command of the sloop Enterprise, fell in with HMS Boxer off Portland, Maine, the next day, and a fierce 45-minute engagement followed. The British captain was cut in two by chain shot and Burrows himself was mortally wounded but lived long enough to accept the British surrender.
The Enterprise and its captive put into Portland, and there the two captains were buried, with equal honors, side by side, where they remain to this day, a monument of sorts both to the concept of honor in wartime and to a strange war, the only one, so far as I can recall, between two nations that spoke the same language. Captain Burrows was 27 years old when he died on the deck of his ship.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a native of Portland, wrote of the battle in his famous poem “My Lost Youth”:
I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of the mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
Congress awarded a gold medal to Burrows’s nearest surviving male relative, and two ships in the U.S. Navy, DD-29 in the First World War and DE-105 in the Second, were named for him. The name of his ship, Enterprise, has been borne by a number of United States naval vessels since, most notably the aircraft carrier that fought throughout the Second World War in the Pacific. She was one of the three American carriers at the Battle of Midway, facing a vastly superior Japanese fleet. And it was from her deck that the dive-bomber strike that sank four Japanese carriers was launched, giving the United States Navy its greatest victory. The current USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was built in the 1960s.
I am happy to say that Capt. Burrows’s sister was my great-great-great-grandmother. His father, Lt. Col. William Ward Burrows, was the first commandant of the Marine Corps and the founder of the famous Marine Corps Band.
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