Combat· West Indies Anti-Piracy Campaign
USS Enterprise vs Cape Antonio
A second strike at the same lair.
Two months after his first descent on Cabo de San Antonio, Kearny brought the USS Enterprise back and took another pirate schooner there, his Marines again furnishing the boarding party. The follow-up showed the value and the limits of attacking a pirate base: the raiders could be scattered and their vessels seized, but they drifted back to the same sheltered coast once the warship moved on, so the place had to be hit again and again. No casualties attended the capture. Kearny's repeated operations at Cape Antonio, more than any single dramatic battle, were what gradually made the western Cuban coast untenable for the pirates, part of the steady attritional pressure by which the West Indies Squadron wore the raiders down through the early 1820s.
Record no. 273