egan, Farragut was assigned to Porter's ship, the frigate Essex.
Despite his age, Farragut was an officer - which meant that from the beginning he commanded seamen years older than himself. Of course, those orders were of the routine type - overseeing the daily clean-up of a deck while the senior officers attended to more responsible matters. The purpose of this type of "command" was educational: the midshipmen learned as much about hands-on seamanship and gunnery from "their" swabbies as they did from more formal classes in navigation and artillery provided by the captain and his lieutenants. During sea battles, the midshipmen ferried orders from officers to officers, from officers to crew. In Farragut's case, he must have impressed both sides of the hierarchy: after the 1814 battle between the Essex and the British ships Phoebe and Cherub, the thirteen year-old was given command of one of the "prize" vessels captured.
Command of a "prize" was a mixed honor. It was the prize officer's duty to take a skeleton crew and transport ship and captured enemy sailors back to an American port. The responsibility was real. Still, the officer selected was one the captain of the mother ship felt could be spared; that is, a midshipman such as young Farragut was not the Essex' most essential officer.
The aftermath of the War of 1812 saw the U.S. Navy operating primarily as a coastal guard for the next decade. Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico pirates raided American shipping. It took the United States government until 1822 to raise the money for a complete squadron to deal with the problem; David Farragut served his time, rising up in the ranks, among those police ships. When Congress passed the 1819 act giving the Navy power to capture slave ships, a new duty was added; both pirates and slavers were generally subdued by 1830.
Still, despite exploratory and diplomatic missions such as Commodore Perry's "opening" of Japan in t...