In October, 1812, as the 32-gun U.S. frigate Essex ventured out against
the British enemy, only one man had any idea that this cruise would turn
into the longest, strangest naval adventure in American history. That
man was Captain David Porter, who had decided to run off with the navy's
ship and its three hundred men to fight a separate Pacific war--one of
privateering, pillaging, and orgies. Drawing on Porter's own writings
and the accounts of eyewitnesses, the author memorably recounts the
events of a dark and fatal voyage in which David Porter crosses the line
from commander to cult-leader, from improbable fantasy to disastrous
reality. In a tale so amazing that it reads like fiction, Porter,
impelled by his own demons and by rivalry with the ghostly British
buccaneer Lord Anson, took his men and boys on a seventeen-month mystery
tour that did not end until he had disrupted the Chilean revolution,
captured the entire English whaling fleet (manned mainly by Americans),
vanished into the enchanted Galapagos, and re-emerged in Polynesia,
where he made himself the conqueror-chief of the stone-age Nukuhivans.
In the end, when he sought redemption with a glorious victory over a
British opponent, he failed terribly and sacrificed the lives of
one-third of his crew to his personal notions of heroism. Robert Booth
tells the story of the ill-fated Essex with accuracy, immediacy, and a
broad vision of its meanings as an epic of war, a gripping tale of the
sea, a brilliant portrait of a disturbed and disturbing American hero,
and a geo-political thriller that sheds new light on the origins of U.S.
imperialism, the tragedy of missed opportunities, and the disastrous and
permanent impact of Porter's rampage on the peoples of the Pacific.
