Fourth of July is when they do the “turn around” cruise. Constitution gets towed out into Boston harbor and turned around so that the sun gets to dry out the other side of the ship. This spreads the weathering by sunlight more evenly and presumably helps the ship to last longer. Fox said some nice things about enemy cannon balls bouncing off her live oak sides, and her 35-0 record in single ship duels over her career.
Constitution was bigger, faster, and more heavily armed than Royal Navy frigates. In those days the biggest warships, line of battle ships, or just “battle ships” had two gun decks and carried a lot of guns. Nelson’s Victory had 100 guns. Run of the mill line of battleships carried 74 guns.
Any large warship with just a single gun deck was called a frigate. Constitution fit this definition; anyone could see thru a telescope that she only had one gun deck. But Constitution carried 44 guns and they were big 24 pounders, battle ship guns. The usual frigate was smaller and only carried 28 or 32 guns and the guns were 12 or 18 pounders. In short Constitution had a lot more firepower, and was faster to boot, she could catch anything afloat and out run anything stronger than she was.
However Royal Navy
captains felt honor bound to engage any American frigate even one much stronger
than they were. The Royal Navy had been
very successful in single ship duels for years and years and her skippers in the war
of 1812 figured that Royal Navy discipline and seamanship could beat
anything. Well not so much in the case
of Constitution. Her heavier gun battery
blew down British masts and slaughtered British crews. The American crew was all good men with a grudge
against the British, usually connected to impressment. They fought with enthusiasm.
Anyhow, after Constitution’s many victories; the British government was forced to issue orders to their frigate captains to avoid getting into fights with Constitution, or her sister ships, unless they outnumbered the American by three to one.
The Brits have a long memory. In the 1930s the Germans launched Graf Spee, a very large ship armed with 11 inch guns. By the standards of the day Graf Spee was a cruiser, heavy cruiser to be sure, but a cruiser. But, the British called Graf Spee a “pocket battleship”, so that British cruiser captains did not feel honor bound to engage. And this worked. In 1939 Graf Spee was out in the oceans commerce raiding. A squadron of three British cruisers, two 6 inch and one 8 inch, located her and engaged. In the furious gun battle that ensued Graf Spee took enough damage that she took refuge in Montevideo harbor in Ecuador. Ecuador was a neutral country, and the laws of war limited a hostile warship’s stay in a neutral harbor to a day or so. So Graf Spee steamed out to meet the British cruisers again; only the German skipper scuttled rather than fighting. He committed suicide after getting back to shore. To the British, sinking the Graf Spee counted as sinking a battleship, and they made a big deal out of it. Only for the memory of the damage “frigate” Constitution had done all those years ago did the Brits succeed in promoting Graf Spee from heavy cruiser to battleship.
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