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War along our shores: Tale of the Cutter Eagle

Cannonballs recovered from the skirmish are on display at Hallockville Museum Farm. (Credit: Barbaraellen Koch)
Cannonballs recovered from the skirmish are on display at Hallockville Museum Farm. (Credit: Barbaraellen Koch)

The defense of the cutter Eagle has gone down as a founding legend of the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard Academy in New London has a mural painted on wall of its library wall depicting the battle.

Capt. Frederick Lee’s legacy is still intact in his hometown near Madison, Conn., and with the Coast Guard, which named a patrol boat in his honor.

ViewpointsBut until recently, the true history of the battle was mostly forgotten by local residents, mixed up with another earlier engagement near Wading River and blurred by erroneous and exaggerated oral histories.

Even today, a historic marker is mounted along the Riverhead coastline near the wrong beach, bearing the wrong ship name and the wrong date.

“What intrigued me about it, as a historian, is how this story has come down to us in so many different versions,” said Richard Wines, who researched the battle and is leading the charge to commemorate its 200th anniversary this October at Hallockville Museum Farm.

In their accounts of the skirmish, all three parties involved — the Connecticut sailors, the locals and the British — omitted certain details and played up others, Mr. Wines found.

“People remember what they want to remember,” he said.

But taking the differing versions as a whole — exaggerations included — reveals a dramatic engagement that unfolded over three days in 1814, Mr. Wines said, when outmatched American sailors and Riverhead’s militia fought one, then two, British warships.

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1814, the Eagle was beached at Northville, where, to the volunteer sailors’ surprise, members of the local militia were already preparing to defend their shores. The farmers and fishermen had spotted the British warship and spread the word. According to one family story, 10-year-old Herman Hallock, who grew up in the 1765 homestead on the Hallockville property, was one of three messengers who took to horseback and rode up and down Sound Avenue warning of the British threat, like a Riverhead Paul Revere, Mr. Wines said.

As the Eagle’s crew rushed to unload four of its cannons and haul them up the cliffs to a more defensible position, two guns were left behind and used to fire on the British barges, keeping them at bay, according to contemporary reports and a log kept by Captain James Gallaway of the Eagle’s British opponent, the Dispatch.

“[The Dispatch] was a fairly small ship so it was fairly flexible and useful around the world,” said James Davey, curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, near London, England.

The Dispatch first launched in 1812 and set sail for the north coast of Spain; as the Napoleonic War dragged on, Britain had little interest in dealing with the upstart Americans, Mr. Davey said.

“They essentially have bigger fishes to fry,” he said. “They’re fighting Napoleon. They’re fighting for their national survival.”

But the Dispatch was ultimately sent to North America after Napoleon was weakened by his infamous attempt to invade Russia in December 1812.

Under Capt. Gallaway’s command, the Dispatch preyed on American merchant fleets until encountering the Eagle that October morning.