With the end of 1813 came the final gasp of chivalry in the naval war

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 283.

“With the end of 1813 came the final gasp of chivalry in the naval war between Britain and America. Master Commandant William Henry Allen was given a funeral with full military honors at Plymouth; his coffin was attended by eight Royal Navy post captains as pallbearers and preceded by an honor guard of two companies of Royal Marines. All of the British navy’s captains in port followed the procession.

An even more poignant display of mutual respect took place a month later in Portland, Maine. The morning of September 8 every business in town was shuttered as two barges, each bearing a coffin, slowly rowed to shore and a minute gun sounded alternately from the two warships standing in the harbor, one the captured British brig Boxer, the other the American brig Enterprize. Three days earlier, just north of Portland, the two ships had maneuvered to within half a pistol shot, a mere ten yards from each other, before opening fire. The outfought British ship surrendered half an hour later; again a British court-martial would admit that the enemy’s “greater degree of skill in the direction of her fire” was responsible for the outcome. But both captains were mortally wounded in the first broadside, Samuel Blyth of the Boxer cut in two by an eighteen-pound shot, William Burrows of the Enterprize blasted with canister shot in the thigh, and their deaths had cast a solemn pall over the news of the American victory when the ships reached Portland the next day.

From the Union Wharf, a military escort led the procession of the two captains’ coffins, Isaac Hull and other American officers following with the entire surviving crews of the two ships, British prisoners and American victors alike. At the Second Parish Meeting House the coffins lay side by side, and then the two rival captains were buried next to each other. It was, wrote C. S. Forester, “a civilized gesture in a war that threatened to become uncivilized.”45 Beyond the mutual accusations of barbarity and atrocity was a settling sense on both sides that only a war of grimly determined destruction could now bring the other to terms. By the end of 1813 the Admiralty had decided to replace Admiral Warren with a man made of sterner stuff.46 He was Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane, who had commanded successful amphibious landings in Egypt and Martinique and who possessed a deep personal loathing of Americans, in part because his brother had been killed at Yorktown in 1781.