The first Peacock was authorized by Act of Congress 3 March 1813; laid down 9 July 1813 by Adam & Noah Brown at the New York Navy Yard; and launched 19 September 1813.
During the War of 1812, Peacock made 3 cruises. Departing New York 12 March 1814, she sailed, with supplies, to the naval station at St. Mary’s, Ga. Off Cape Canaveral, Fla. 29 April, she captured her first prize, H.M. brig Epervier, which she sent to Savannah. Peacock departed that port 4 June on her second cruise; proceeding to the Grand Banks and along the coasts of Ireland and Spain, she returned, via the West Indies, to New York. The sloop captured 14 enemy vessels of various sizes during this journey.
On the 23rd of February, the British 18-gun brig-sloop Epervier, Captain Richard Wales, (sixteen 32 and two 18 pound carronades,) cruising off cape Sable, captured, without opposition, the American privateer-brig Alfred, of Salem, mounting sixteen long 9 pounders, and manned with 108 men; the British 38-gun Junon, Captain Clotworthy Upton, in sight about ten miles to-leeward.
On his way to Halifax with his prize, Captain Wales discovered that part of his crew had conspired with the late crew of the Alfred, to rise upon the British officers, and carry one, if not both vessels, into a port of the United States. As the readiest mode to frustrate the plan, Captain Wales persevered against a gale of wind, and on the 25th arrived at Halifax; when he immediately represented to the commanding officer of that port, the insufficiency of the Epervier's crew for any service, and, in particular, his doubts about their loyalty, from the plot they had recently been engaged in. However, the affair was treated lightly, and on the 3rd of March the Epervier, without a man of her crew being changed, sailed, in company with the Shelbourne schooner, for the "protection" of a small convoy bound to Bermuda and the West Indies.
Having reached her outward destination in safety, the Epervier on the 14th of April sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, on her return to Halifax; and, as if the reputation of her officers and of the flag she bore was not enough for such a crew as the Epervier's to be intrusted with, the brig took on board at Havana, where she afterwards called, 118000 dollars in specie.
On the 25th of April the Epervier sailed from Havana, in company with one of the vessels, an hermaphrodite brig bound to Bermuda, which she had convoyed from Port Royal.
On the 29th, at about half past seven in the morning, latitude 27º47' north, longitude 80º7' west, a ship under Russian colours, from Havana bound to Boston, joined the Epervier, then steering north-by-east, with the wind about east-south-east. Shortly afterwards a large ship was discovered in the south-west, apparently in chase of the convoy.
At nine the Epervier hauled her wind on the larboard tack, so as to keep between the latter and the stranger, whom we may at once introduce as the United States ship-sloop Peacock, of 22 guns, (twenty 32-pound carronades and two long 18-pounders,) commanded by master Commandant Lewis Warrington.
No answer being returned to the brig's signals, the English ensign and pendant which the Peacock hoisted did not remove the suspicions of her being an enemy; and accordingly the Epervier made the signal to that effect to her convoy.
At forty minutes past nine the Peacock, who had had approached rapidly on account of the wind having veered to the southward, hauled down the English colours, and hoisted the American flag at almost every mast and stay. At ten o'clock, when within half gun-shot of the Epervier, the Peacock, edged away as if to bring her broadside to bear in a raking position. This the brig evaded by putting her helm up, until close on the Peacock's bow, when she rounded-to and fired her starboard guns. With this their first discharge, the three after most carronades became unshipped by the fighting-bolts giving way.
The guns were soon replaced; and, having, when she got abaft the beam of her opponent, tacked and shortened sail, the Epervier received the broadside of the Peacock, as the latter kept away with the wind on the larboard beam. Although the first fire of the American ship produced no material effect. a continued discharge of star and bar shot cut away the rigging and sails of the brig, and completely dismasted her. Just as the Epervier, by a well directed fire, had brought down her opponent's fore-yard, several of the carronades on the larboard side behaved as those on the starboard side had done, and continued to upset, as often as they were placed and discharged.
In the midst of this confusion, the main boom, having been shot away, fell upon the wheel, and the Epervier, having had her head-sails all cut to pieces, became thrown into a position to be raked; but, fortunately for her, the Peacock had too much head-way, to rake her with more than two or three shots. Having by this time shot away the brig's main topmast, and rendered her completely unmanageable, the Peacock directed the whole of her fire at her opponents hull, and presently reduced the Epervier's three waist guns to the disabled state of the others. At eleven o'clock, as if the defects in the fighting-bolts were not enough were not a sufficient disaster, the breaching-bolts began to draw.
[had the Epervier's carronades been previously fired in exercise, for any length of time together, the defect in the clinching of her breeching-bolts ( a defect common to the vessels of this and the smaller classes, nearly all of them being contract built) would have been discovered, and perhaps remedied.- James's Naval Occurrences page 344]
There being no immediate remedy here, an effort was made to get the brig round, in order to present a fresh broadside to the enemy; but it was found impracticable, without falling on board the Peacock. As a last resource, therefore, and one which the British seamen are generally prompt to execute, Captain Wales called the crew aft, to follow him in boarding; but these gentlemen declined a measure so fraught with danger.
The Epervier, having now one gun only wherewith to return the fire of her antagonist's eleven; being already with four and a half feet [of] water in the hold, and her crew falling fast beneath the heavy and unremitting fire of the Peacock, no alternative remained but to strike the colours, to save the lives of the few remaining good men in the vessel.
This was done at five minutes past eleven, after the firing had lasted an hour; during three quarters of which the vessels lay close together, and during more than half of which, owing to the defects in the brig's armament, the successful party had it all to himself.
Besides the damages already detailed, the Epervier had her fore-rigging and stays shot away, her bowsprit badly wounded, and her foremast cut nearly in two and left tottering, and which nothing but the smoothness of the water saved from falling. Her hull, as may be imagined, was pierced with shot-holes on the engaged larboard side, both above and below the water.
The brig's loss, out of a crew of 101 men and a passenger, and sixteen boys, amounted to eight killed and mortally wounded, and fifteen wounded severely and slightly, including among the former her very gallant first lieutenant, John Hackett; who, about the middle of the action, had his left arm shattered, and received a severe splinter-wound in the hip, but who yet would hardly suffer himself to be carried below. Captain Warrington's boasts, with reason, that that the Peacock's principal injury was the wound in her fore-yard. Not a shot, by his account, struck the ship's hull; and her loss, in consequence, out of a crew of 185 picked seamen, without a boy among them, amounted to only two men wounded, neither of them dangerously.
A statement of comparative force would, in this case, be next to a nullity; as how could we, with any shew of reason, confront eight carronades that overset the moment they were fired, with ten carronades that remained firm in their places to the last.
For any damage that such a vessel as the Epervier could have done to her, the Peacock might almost well have fought with the unarmed Russian ship that has just quitted the former's company, and then have boasted, as Captain Warrington did, how many shots the Peacock placed in her antagonist's hull, and how free from any she escaped in her own.
Had the Epervier been manned with a crew of choice seamen, equal in personal appearance to those received out of the Chesapeake and Argus, after they had been respectively carried by boarding, we might some faith in captain Porter's assertion, that British seamen were not so brave as they had been represented.
But, shall we take the Epervier's crew as a sample of British seamen? As well might we judge of the moral character of a nation by the inmates of her jails, or take the first deformed object we meet, as the standard of the size and shape of her people.
Peacock departed New York 23 January 1815 with Hornet and Tom Bowline and rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, where she captured 3 valuable prizes. On 30 June she captured cruiser Nautilus in the Straits of Sunda; learning of peace, Peacock’s commander released the prize and returned to New York, 30 October.
The American sloop Peacock, [Captain Lewis Warrington] after she had been compelled to part from her consort the Hornet, pursued her way to the East Indies, and on the 30th of June, being off Anjier [Lat 6 South Long 106 West approx.] the Straits of Sunda, fell in with the honourable company’s brig-cruiser Nautilus, of 14 guns, (ten 18-pound carronades and four long nines,) commanded by Lieutenant Charles Boyce.
On the Peacock’s approach within hail, the lieutenant inquired if her captain knew that peace had been declared [Captain Warrington’s reply was to order] "Haul down your colours instantly". This "reasonable" demand Lieutenant Boyce considered, very properly, as an imperious and insulting mandate; and, fully alive to the dignity of the British flag, and to the honour of the service of which he was so distinguished an ornament, prepared to cope with a ship, whose immense superiority, as she overshadowed his little bark, gave him nothing to expect short of a speedy annihilation.
An action ensued; which of course, in a very little time, ended by the Nautilus hauling down her colours. But this she did not do until her gallant commander was most dangerously wounded
"a grape-shot that measured two inches and one-third in diameter, entering at the outside of his hip, and passing out close under the backbone. This severe wound did not, however, disable him. In a few minutes a 32-pound shot struck obliquely on his right knee, shattering the joint, splintering the leg-bone downwards and the thigh-bone a great way upwards. This may be supposed laid him prostrate on the deck"-James Naval Occurrences p. 502
One seaman, two European invalids, and three lascars killed, her first lieutenant, (mortally,) two seamen , and five lascars wounded. The dismounting of a bow gun, and four or five wounded, appears to have been the extent of the injury sustained by the Peacock.
It will scarcely be credited that, about a quarter of an hour before the two vessels came in contact, Mr. Bartlett, the master of the Nautilus, and coronet White, one of her passengers, in one boat, and Mr. MacGregor, the Master-Attendant at Anjier, in another, had gone onboard the Peacock, in a friendly way, to communicate the news of peace scarcely had Mr. Bartlett stepped upon the deck than, without being allowed to ask a question, he was hurried below.
Happily, Mr. MacGregor met with rather better success. The instant he arrived on board, he communicated to the Peacock’s first lieutenant, the most authentic information of the peace having been concluded between Great Britain and America, grounded on no less authority than Mr. Madison’s proclamation; which Mr. Macgregor had himself received from an American ship, passing the Straits on her way to China.
What effect had this communication? Captain Warrington, whom the single word "peace" ought to have made pause, before he spilled the blood of his fellow creatures, ordered Mr. MacGregor to be taken below.
The Nautilus’s first lieutenant, Mr. Mayston, languished till the 3rd of December, a period of five months, when mortification of his wound carried him off.
About a fortnight after the action, Lieutenant Boyce suffered amputation very near his hip, on account of the length and complication of the fracture. The pain and danger of the operation was augmented by the proximity of the grape-shot wound. His life was subsequently dispaired of; but, after a long course of hopes and fears to his numerous friends, this brave and amiable young man (or what Captain Warrington had left of him) survived. Of course, the American captain, who had himself escaped unhurt, the moment he was informed of the casualties on board his prize, either visited, or sent a condoling message to her dreadfully mangled commander?-
Reader! He did neither.
Captain Warrington, in the words of the poor sufferer, in his memorial to the Court of Directors, "proved himself totally destitute of fellow-feeling and commiseration; for, during the time her retained possession of the Nautilus, which was until two o’clock the next afternoon he was not once moved to make a commonplace enquiry after the memorialist, in his then deplorable condition."
Peacock left this port again 13 June 1816, bound for France, with Hon. Albert Gallatin and party aboard. After pulling into Havre de Grace 2 July, she proceeded to join the Mediterranean Squadron. But for a year of Mediterranean– United States—and return transit, 15 November 1818–17 November 1819, the sloop remained with this squadron until 8 May 1821, when she departed for home; she then went into ordinary at the Washington Navy Yard 10 July.
Pirates were ravaging West Indian shipping in the 1820’s and on 3 June 1822, Peacock became flagship of Commodore Porter’s “Mosquito Fleet,” that boldly rooted out the pirate menace. Peacock served in the expedition that broke up a pirate establishment at Funda Bay, 28–30 September, capturing several schooners. Peacock captured schooner Pilot 10 April 1823 and another sloop the 16th. In September, “malignant” fever necessitated a recess from activities, and Peacock pulled into Norfolk 28 November for a breather.
In March 1824, the sloop proceeded to the Pacific and for some months cruised along the west coast of South America, where the colonies were struggling for independence. In September 1825, Peacock sailed to Hawaii, where a treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation was negotiated. From 24 July 1826 until 6 January 1827, the sloop visited other Pacific islands, to protect American commerce and the whaling industry. On the return to South America from Hawaii, the ship was struck by a whale, causing serious damage. Nevertheless, she reached Callao, from which she departed 25 June for New York.
Arriving New York in October 1827, the sloop decommissioned and was broken up at New York in 1828.
Howard Chapelle, The History of the American Sailing Navy: the Ships and their Development (New York: Norton, 1949)