It’s after midnight, but the stars above the Chesapeake illuminate the mainsail of the Pride of Baltimore II like the wing of an enormous pale bird, the rigging intersecting the night sky in some complex geometry, tying sky to boat to water. As the crew moves around the deck, fastening the lines and coiling ropes, and as the captain studies our direction, I’m stretched out along the smooth wood atop the rear cabin house to watch the stars and listen to what’s left of the wind, struck by the beauty of the late evening hour and of the boat itself, a wooden topsail schooner that towers 110 feet up into the night.

Just a few minutes before, we’d cruised beneath the Bay Bridge, the outline of the traffic in the dark evoking both roadside neon and old-world ghosts. And although the tall double masts cleared with plenty of room to spare, it had seemed impossible that they would, as if the juxtaposition of 1812-era wooden clipper ship and 20th-century steel-and-concrete infrastructure was too incommensurate to grasp.

This feeling of disjointedness has been a hallmark of the trip, a three-day sail from Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, up the Chesapeake to Havre de Grace on a reproduction of the renowned clipper ships that were constructed in and sailed out of Baltimore two centuries ago.

The captain calls out to the crew, a group of 10 men and women, professional sailors of various ages and backgrounds who had signed up for a full-time stint of at least six months—some for their first experience sailing a tall ship, others who’d been sailing them for decades. The sails are lowered, the 700-lb. anchor unwound and dropped into the relative shallows of the Chester River. A night lantern is hoisted overhead. Brightly colored lights also go up, strung atop the masts.

“Why not party lights?” asks Shevawn Innes, the first mate, her long hair wound into a messy bun, tattoos down her arms. “Spread joy recklessly.”

Two or three deckhands climb along the jib, folding the topsail into pleats and tying it down like a massive umbrella. When the sails are secure and all the ropes coiled—the Pride has 11 sails and nearly two miles of ropes—captain Jeff Crosby gives a brief summation of the day’s sail and an overview of what’s coming tomorrow. Released for the night, a few crew members linger on deck, as do the three of us who’ve signed on to guest crew, appreciating the view of the calm water and the lights ashore.

Imagine finding yourself aboard a ship you’ve heard about for years, embedded into a crew of modern-day ordinary-life privateers, going bonkers just staring at the water in the middle of the night. Not an easy job, sailing.

The Pride offers guest crew positions for most of her journeys, short sails like this one, or the longer voyages from her Inner Harbor home to Norfolk, Boston, New York, around the Maritimes and up the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, even to Bermuda.

Pride is a nonprofit that gets its funding from state grants, donations, and this program. For a fee that can range between $350 to a few thousand, anyone can come aboard as a working passenger bunking in the cabins, eating with the crew, and helping do things like keep watch, set and lower the sails, assist with routine maintenance, haul and coil ropes, and even take the helm, albeit under the watchful eye of actual crew members.

Depending on wind and weather—and the utter impossibility of knowing what can happen on any journey aboard a wooden sailing ship—this can mean hauling ropes in a rainstorm or climbing 50 feet overhead to secure windblown sails while hitched to a rope ladder with a carabiner. That said, our trip to Havre de Grace was less Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and more Joseph Conrad (The Mirror of the Sea), at least his more meditative works.

The skies were late-summer sunny and the winds almost too calm. My fellow guest crew members, Carl Kosok, a retired computer programmer from Silver Spring, and Sean O’Brien, a children’s book author and former Biden speech writer from D.C., and I mostly coiled ropes, chatted with the real crew, and tried to stay out of their way. We each had different reasons for coming aboard, though a love of the open water and the boats that sail it was a given. Kosok had gone on a dozen or so of these trips over the years, while one of O’Brien’s books featured historic tall ships and his father had once sailed aboard Pride.

As for me, my great-great-grandfather had been a shipbuilder in Nova Scotia, where he built schooners in the second half of the 19th century. His son, also a shipbuilder and sailor, brought his family to the port of Baltimore, where my grandmother would meet my grandfather, and where my mother was eventually born. Although her brother followed in the family tradition, sailing his 36-foot sloop from Annapolis to Nova Scotia and across the Atlantic, I grew up in land-locked Iowa, and it took me years to get back to the ocean. (To the Atlantic first, for college in Maine; and two decades later to Baltimore, as imaginary reparations to my long-dead Quaker mother.)

I like to think there’s something in our DNA that ties us to the sea, like those cables of Aran sweaters women knitted both for warmth and as a way to identify their drowned fishermen. So though my seamanship was limited to kayaking and Conrad novels, I fell in love with Pride the first time I saw her docked at Broadway Pier in Fells Point and was given a free tour of the deck.

On the second day of the trip, we sailed up the Chesapeake at a slow three knots, trimming the sails to come around into a light wind as we headed toward Baltimore. The previous day we’d gone 68 miles under sail, mostly short tacking. That had meant a busy day for the crew as the boat slalomed up the Bay, notes Crosby—who is in his third season as captain, although he’d started sailing on Pride in 2008.

“Pride is fairly unique in her mission,” says Crosby, pulling at his short beard as he scans the horizon. “It’s not just ocean voyages or education day sails. And with a professional crew, you can push the boat further.”

As for the guest crews, he says they’re “to get people engaged, so it’s not just the crew members telling the story again and again.”

It’s some story, and it began not with the boat we’re sailing on, but her predecessor, the original Pride of Baltimore, which was the first Baltimore Clipper ship to be built in 150 years. Constructed in 1977 in an Inner Harbor open-air shipyard, the first Pride was a testament to Baltimore’s renaissance and shipbuilding history and inspired by the Chasseur, a topsail schooner that successfully fought against the British in the War of 1812.

The original Pride sailed around the world for nine years as an ambassador for the city before sinking in a sudden microburst squall near Puerto Rico in 1986, losing her captain and three of her crew. Shortly after the tragedy, a new ship was commissioned, both to replace the popular original and to act as a memorial to the lost crew. Built in 18 months, she launched in 1988 and has since sailed over 275,000 nautical miles around the world, visiting more than 200 ports in 40 countries.

“The mission was already established,” says Crosby and, as if to make his point, a small boat comes alongside to check us out a few moments later, with folks onboard waving and taking pictures.

This happens, says Crosby, “all the time, no matter where we are.” With seven of her 11 sails unfurled, trying to catch the wind as we make our way up the Bay on our second day out, she’s a spectacular sight, a miraculously resurrected messenger from the past.

After a stint of slow sailing and a quick lunch in the galley, Crosby and Innes direct the crew to start taking down the sails. Other deckhands make fast the system of ropes in some complex, ancient version of cat’s cradle. Stephen Plante, a barefoot deckhand from Rhode Island in a Pride “All Wood All Good” baseball cap and Aran sweater, instructs the guest crew on how to loop coils (working and dogbone coils, harpoon and ballantine coils; the list goes on).

“Nothing feels meaningless on this boat,” says Plante, who started sailing sunfishes when he was eight and crewed aboard tall ships in England before signing up on this one. “We all do all the work. You learn how to varnish, how to sand, how to sew.”

By mid-afternoon, we’re motoring—yes, Pride has modern engines, as well as a Zodiac nested atop her wooden rowboat—past Sparrows Point at 5 knots, past a tug pushing a barge of gravel from a Havre de Grace quarry. Gulls and ospreys keen and dive and we pass crab pots, their buoys and little flags like bright, regional markers.

While Pride looks like the 19th-century schooner she was built to replicate above decks, with her wooden masts and canvas sails, coils of ropes, maritime flags, four working cannons and two swivel guns, belowdecks she’s more of a circa-1960s yacht than a privateer ship.

“Do you want to spend a year of your life living in a hammock? Not so much,” says Crosby, with a small laugh.

We’ve been quartered in surprisingly comfortable double-bunk cabins; there’s a bathroom, or head, with a shower; and a roomy galley and big, wooden communal dining table.

Suzy Zahradka, a longtime sailor from Duluth, Minnesota, who’d recently signed on as the cook, is up at dawn the next morning, brewing coffee and making sheet-pan frittatas, expertly maneuvering the pots and ingredients around the space. Some supplies are kept in a tiny, refrigerated pantry; others are hidden in a compartment beneath the floor; more are stored underneath the cushioned seats wedged behind the table. Slats called fiddles keep things from sliding around the stove and the counter. She owns two small wooden boats back home and is a War of 1812 reenactor, so when she saw the opening aboard Pride, she applied.

“It’s a challenge to cook when you’re keeled over; you feel like you’re running uphill,” she says, a row of mugs slightly shaking from their hooks above her head.

The rest of the crew have journeys as idiosyncratic and seaworthy. Lucy Canfield, the bosun, a wiry 20-year-old from Erie, Pennsylvania, wearing camo pants and a belted knife sheath, has been sailing since she was 14. Her first sailing experience? A tall ship. Deckhand Emily Stringer (blonde crewcut, crab-feast T-shirt), just graduated from the College of the Atlantic with a degree in marine biology and grew up sailing on the Long Island Sound with her grandfather. She had sailed on another tall ship in the South Pacific. Listening to their stories, it’s increasingly difficult not to dream of trading in street shoes for deck boots and just staying aboard.

As we head north, past Hart-Miller Island, the mouth of the Gunpowder River, and the forested oasis of Pooles Island and its lighthouse, the oldest still standing in Maryland, Innes tasks the crew with myriad chores that the break in sailing allows—checking machinery, repairing lines, and, yes, scrubbing the deck.

Innes is on her third stint aboard Pride, having been first mate since 2022, second mate a few seasons before that, and, back in 2008, a deckhand along with Crosby. In between sailing contracts, she’d been a professional roller derby skater.

“I love the people who choose to do this with their lives. They’re some of the most capable, competent, community-oriented people I’ve ever met,” she says. “I also really enjoy the athleticism of traditional sailing; it’s a living craft. But I also just love this boat.”

It’s a feeling palpably shared by the rest of the crew—as well as me and the other two novices, who’ve been trailing the deckhands around, looping ropes and hauling lines like eager children.

With calm skies and water, O’Brien and I gear up in harnesses and climb the shrouds after the crew, ascending the rope ladders to help secure the sails along the yard. It’s more fun than frightening, an airborne jungle gym, and the Bay falls away into the horizon below, the isosceles triangle of the boat’s prow like a toy ship in a dark blue bathtub.

On the final morning of the sail, Crosby turns his attention to the cannons. Defenders Day, a longtime commemoration celebrating the city’s successful 1814 defense against British invasion forces, is coming up. Pride will be firing her cannons for the event, and the crew needs the practice. This being considerably more fun than swabbing the decks, everyone gathers to assemble the gear from a locked box: cannon pins, explosive charges, a museum-worthy powder horn, and tools to pack the charge.

As with every move on the boat, both orders and replies are called out, a nautical version of the ecclesiastical call and response. The cannons are loaded and Kai Joswig, a deckhand from Belize in a tie-dyed T-shirt, dons protective glasses and earmuffs and lights the first one. He’s wielding the kind of propane torch you’d find at a Home Depot, a surprising but oddly satisfying touch.

“To make a little noise,” the captain says with a smile, “but also to test them, since they haven’t been fired in a bit.”

As we near Havre de Grace, we fire the last of the cannons. A thick plume of white smoke forms its own weather system out into the sunlit harbor. The flags are lowered, and all the lines and ropes and pullies across the deck seem to moor the boat not only to the land again, but to tether the past to the present—the history of shipbuilding and sailing secured to all the harbors down the Chesapeake.

The Charm City of 1812 was a far cry from the Baltimore of today—in fact, it was not a city at all. Picture the 250-year-old waterfront section of Annapolis, and it gives you a pretty good idea. That’s been tidied up for the tourists, of course, so think a bit grimier. And though the jurisdiction of Baltimore at that time included what is now the county, the developed part, like old Annapolis, was tiny: Urban sprawl hadn’t been invented yet, so forget the sports bars in Towson, the malls in Owings Mills, even the rail lines. The first of the historic mills along the Jones Falls in Hampden and Mt. Washington had just started production, but except for such small outcroppings of civilization, the farmland and forests started roughly north of Fayette Street, west of Howard Street, and to the east at Patterson Park, which wasn’t yet a park.

The railroad hadn’t come yet, so Baltimore existed purely as a seaport. Nearly all of its 50,000 inhabitants (today, there are 690,000) owed their livelihood to the merchant ships that plied the East Coast, the Atlantic to Europe and back, and the waters of the Caribbean.

The Inner Harbor and Fells Point were bristling with the masts of dozens of sailing ships, unloading goods—yes, including slaves—and loading things like cotton, grain, and tobacco. The noisy, dirty, cobblestone streets between the wooden houses reeked of horse manure, rotting marine life, livestock, open sewers, and wood smoke from the fireplaces and blacksmiths’ sheds. And no, you wouldn’t have wanted to swim in the harbor then, either. Walking through that rich pall of smoke and smells, you’d hear the metallic sounds of hammer and anvil, ships’ bells, and the clattering of horses and carts. And in the crowded streets would be a lot of leathery, tough-looking merchant sailors with bad teeth: a mix of American-born whites, free blacks (there were 10,000 here then, more than anywhere else in the republic), plus English, Irish, and Scottish immigrants.

These real-life Jack Sparrows knew a thing or two about muskets, knives, cannons, grappling hooks, and, given the opportunity, boarding ships. Paying their wages was the occasional portly, well-dressed gentleman in the crowd, who either owned ships, built ships, or invested in maritime trading ventures. And the few women in fine carriages wearing the latest European fashions? The wives and daughters of the fat cats, of course.

So what greater threat to our survival could there be (other than cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and smallpox, of course) than a war that cut off our life blood, the seaborne trade?

The now 2-year-old war with the British wasn’t going particularly well, either. Most of the fighting so far had been along the Canadian border, with American forces, including many from Maryland, sparring with well-trained Redcoats and their hired Indian tribes over forts, territory, and waterways. Remember that the United States had a very small professional army at this point, and relied on citizen-soldiers who, at the start of all this, had little more experience than a mall security guard. Apart from Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s defeat of British naval forces in Lake Erie (a third of his men were free blacks) and some isolated victories by individual American warships on the open sea, the Americans were outgunned by a British army and navy with seemingly endless resources and years of combat experience in Europe.

For those portly businessmen of Baltimore and Fells Point who wanted to salvage something from all this economically, the answer was clear: become privateers. The new republic had virtually no navy, either, so once war was declared, Congress invoked a little-known clause in the constitution that allowed them to create an instant navy of privately owned ships with seasoned, money-motivated crews: With a so-called “letter of marque” from the government making them privateers, these now-legal pirates could put cannons instead of cotton bales on their swiftest ships and ravage British merchant shipping, legally enriching themselves with whatever goods or ships they could capture and bring back to Baltimore. And Baltimore produced some of the swiftest of these lightly armed ships, with designs similar to the reproduction topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore II. So it was that Baltimore became a “nest of pirates” to the British traders, who put increasing pressure on Parliament and the British Navy to shut the place down.

So, let’s face it, we invited the wrath of the British. But when it came, the remarkable defense of the city, was, to a large extent, carried out by these same Baltimore merchant sailors. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

British warships were in the Chesapeake as early as February 1813, but it wasn’t until August of 1814 that they built up a really large fleet. Troublesome Baltimore was the primary target, but the new capital, Washington, D.C., was conveniently on the way, so they headed there first. And while he was at it, British Rear Admiral George Cockburn’s fleet, with its thousands of marines landing in longboats, ravaged the small towns and villages along both shores of the bay if they were suspected of lending any support to the American war effort. As the fleet sailed up the Potomac River toward Alexandria, 4,000 British troops under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross marched for Bladensburg outside Washington in temperatures near 100 degrees.

There was no shortage of American volunteers, but the communications, organization, and training of the American militia under Gen. William Winder were all disastrously bad. At the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, the citizen-soldiers of the American defense fled before the Redcoats in what one observer called “The Bladensburg Races.” Word was sent to President James Madison that all was lost, and he, his wife Dolley, and cabinet members hastily tried to rescue documents and artwork (including Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of George Washington in the White House, which was rolled up after being ripped from its frame) before fleeing the city, along with most of the city’s 8,000 residents. Lacking today’s motorcade and Secret Service detail, the aging President Madison wandered the countryside for days on horseback trying to rally scattered American forces. But the capital might have been spared had it not been for the frightfully bad manners of the Americans.

Lt. George Gleig was part of Gen. Ross’s British force nearing Washington after the Americans fled at Bladensburg. Glieg wrote later: “Such being the intention of General Ross, he did not march the troops immediately into the city, but halted them upon a plain in its immediate vicinity, whilst a flag of truce was sent in with terms. But whatever his proposal might have been, it was not so much as heard, for scarcely had the party bearing the flag entered the street, than they were fired upon (by Americans) from the windows of one of the houses, and the horse of the General himself, who accompanied them, was killed. You will easily believe that conduct so unjustifiable, so direct a breach of the law of nations, roused the indignation of every individual, from the General himself down to the private soldier. All thoughts of accommodation were instantly set aside.”

After eating dinner in an empty White House, British admiral Cockburn ordered the city set on fire, including the White House, the Capitol, and many other public buildings.

So what greater threat could there be to our survival than a war that cut off our seaborne trade?

In Baltimore, the word spread quickly, and alarmed citizens could watch the glow of the Washington fires on the southern horizon on the night of the 24th from atop Federal Hill, notes Scott S. Sheads, author of The Rockets’ Red Glare.

Much has been written about this so-called “forgotten war,” but Sheads, 60, a long-time Locust Point resident and regular at the Hull Street Blues Cafe, has unique experience as an 1812 historian. The winner of the National Park Services’ Special Achievement Award, he’s served as a ranger-historian at Fort McHenry for 30 years, and scoured hundreds of historical documents to research his authoritative book.

“When they heard what happened in Washington, Baltimoreans were basically thrown into a panic,” says Sheads. “Two thousand Baltimore militiamen had been at Bladensburg, so families were anxious, and as the survivors straggled back to Baltimore at night, in the rain, rumors spread that the British were right behind them. Some people even loaded all their belongings in carts and fled to the countryside.”

Most everything important back then was done on the local, not the federal, level. So try to imagine Stephanie Rawlings-Blake overseeing the defense of the city against an imminent attack by aliens. (If Michael Bay makes this into a movie, remember you heard it here first.)

It fell, then, to the Baltimore mayor’s defense committee, which had already been working to bolster defenses, to go into double time, knowing they were next on the British fleet’s to-do list.

While we’re at it, let’s also debunk this myth that the whole ruckus was about Fort McHenry—yet another historical half-truth. There were two guys named Smith and Stricker who were as important to the way things shook out, but they get very little press. Stricker’s tale is coming up, but it was Gen. Sam Smith—a respected veteran of the Revolutionary War and former U.S. congressman and senator—who, after some internal bickering over who was really in charge, was made commander of the city’s defense. And that made him the superior officer to Maj. Gen. George Armistead in the fort. At the last minute, Gen. Smith even got the Maryland governor to promote him to the rank of major general lest he have to answer to the discredited Gen. Winder of the Bladensburg debacle. This was no simple task since, as Baltimore historian and professor Bob Mullauer notes, the governor at the time was Levin Winder, the uncle of Gen. William Winder of Bladensburg.

There were very few regular army units at hand, so Gen. Smith went looking for volunteers to bolster the city’s defenses. Answering the call were farmers, shopkeepers, apprentice laborers, and tradesmen—some in their teens and others grizzled veterans of the Revolution, who would have been in their 40s, 50s, or 60s—as well as free blacks, who the city also urged to join the volunteers. But though they couldn’t be made to march straight, it was the sailors, mechanics, and gunners of the privateer fleet in Fells Point who formed the backbone of the city’s defense.

And the city and its fat-cat merchants were determined enough to protect their ships and warehouses full of goods that they paid the citizen-soldiers well: $8 a month (close to $400 today). After all, they had heard about the burning, looting, and seizures the British had inflicted on the ships and packed warehouses at the harbor in Alexandria.

Gen. Smith knew the British wouldn’t try to pass through the narrow channel into Baltimore’s harbor until Fort McHenry was pummeled into submission. But, just in case, he had the volunteer sailors, which included a great many free blacks, block the entrance to the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River—which leads to the inner harbor—with masts and booms linked together with chain. Cannon batteries were set up by the volunteer sailors along the inlets and harbors of the western shore, and the volunteers developed a system of colored flags manned at intervals along the coast to relay any sighting of British ships.

Improvisation was the order of the day: Maj. Armistead’s troops at the fort mounted additional longer-range cannon from a French warship that had limped to Baltimore after being damaged in a storm. Likewise, a great many of the cannon used in the defense were naval guns mounted to carriages by the volunteer merchant sailors, whose ships were bottled up at Fells Point not just by the British navy, but by their own cross-channel boom as well.

At noon on Sunday, September 11, 1814, the British fleet of 50 ships appeared on the horizon, just beyond where the Key Bridge is now. Some of them moved to North Point, too, signaling they weren’t just going for a frontal attack on the fort. They were going to land troops to the east and try to do what Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Iraq war called the “Hail Mary”: A frontal naval attack would provide distraction while a land attack would come through the back door.

The signal cannon on Federal Hill sounded the alarm, church bells pealed, and militiamen poured into the streets to join their units, assembling at Pratt and Light Streets.

In Rockets’ Red Glare, Sheads describes the scene: “At 3 p.m., Brigadier [General] John Stricker’s well-trained Third Brigade, a total of some 3,185 men, marched out of the city. . . . With regimental flags flying, marching to the martial beat of fifes and drums, the Americans set forth upon the North Point Road. By early evening they had marched the seven miles down to the Old Methodist Meeting House, to a planned line of defense, and encamped for the night.” Their orders were to delay the British advance while the city finished preparations.

Back in the harbor entrance on Monday morning, a volunteer sailing master named Beverly Diggs and his crew were ordered to block the channel with sunken ships—no matter whose they were.

“We took three vessels, towed them out, and sunk them agreeably to orders,” he wrote later. “Such was the haste in which they were required to perform this duty that no time was taken or any attempts made to . . . ascertain to whom the vessels belong.” (Release the lawyers: Lawsuits against the government filed by the ships’ owners dragged on for years afterward, notes historian Mullauer.)

About the same time, the British moved in toward the fort, with 16 ships, including rocket and bomb ships, forming a semi-circle two miles below Fort McHenry. They then fired their first shots to check their range.

From their anchorage, the Brits could see Fells Point and the ships of the merchantmen and privateers who had caused them so much annoyance and expense and must have licked their chops at the prospect of seizing, sinking, or burning the lot of them.

With their nearly 300 guns firing 190-pound explosive shells and barrages of rockets (with their frightening whizzing sound, they were good for shock and awe), the British started a 24-hour pummeling of the fort, just out of range of the fort’s cannon.

The whole town had a front-row seat on the harbor attack, which was described by Baltimore’s Salem Gazette newspaper: “The attack on Fort McHenry, by nearly the whole British fleet was distinctly seen from Federal Hill and from the tops of houses which were covered with men, women, and children. The night of Tuesday and the morning of Wednesday until about 4 o’clock presented the awful spectacle of shot and shells, and rockets, shooting and bursting through the air. . . . As the darkness increased, the awful grandeur of the scene augmented.”

Imagine Stephanie Rawlings-Blake overseeing the defense of the city.

Go up to some stranger walking their pit bull in Patterson Park or some family from Pennsylvania touring Fort McHenry in matching Steelers T-shirts and ask what they know about the War of 1812, and they’re likely to react with blank stares, or some vague stuff about the national anthem. But the story is different in Edgemere, a blue-collar community on the bay near the end of North Point Road.

The peninsula looks close enough to Baltimore City on a map, but drive all the way down it, past the auto body shops, shady bars, and used-car dealers, and you’re in another world. Gradually, the scenery on both sides of the road becomes much like it would have looked 200 years ago, with marshes, woods, fields, and frequent glimpses of the bay between the stands of timber. This is probably the only place in Maryland where you can be assured of finding locals who know something about the War of 1812, in part, perhaps, because of the placards denoting the British land assault that punctuate the lower half of the road.

Near the end of the peninsula, we found the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, North Point No. 4, (they do good deeds, mostly for kids) where members were preparing a shrimp dinner in memory of a deceased colleague.

Among them was Joe Labuda, 66, retired after 36 years at Bethlehem Steel and a self-described “historical nut.”

He’ll tell you, correctly, that on the 12th, British marines and soldiers under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross of Bladensburg fame landed, and Stricker and his men were waiting for them a few miles up the road, with two lines of defense, about four miles north of where Sparrows Point High School now sits. (There’s a plaque outside the school, too.)

Back then, Labuda says, there were a few large farms along the road, and that morning, while eating breakfast at the home of one of those farmers, Admiral Cockburn and Gen. Ross listened to the interrogation of three American cavalrymen who had been captured. The dragoons wouldn’t reveal the strength of Stricker’s unit waiting for Ross’s force up the road, but did tell them that a total of 10,000 to 15,000 men awaited them under Gen. Smith’s command. But when he heard they were all militia, and not professional soldiers, Ross famously quipped, “I don’t care if it rains militia.”

Labuda remembers another great quote, too, one he picked from Dawn’s Early Light, by well-known historian Walter Lord. “The farmer who owned the house asked if the general planned to be back for dinner that evening,” Labuda says. “‘No,’” said Ross. “‘I’ll eat in Baltimore tonight—or in hell.’” They were all words he would not live long enough to regret.

After breakfast, while Ross and Cockburn rode forward to check progress against Stricker, Ross was struck by a sniper’s bullet, shots credited to two teenage leather-trade apprentices, Daniel Wells and Henry G. McComas, who were part of a volunteer unit that had fought at Bladensburg. They were teaming up as shooter and spotter, Labuda believes, as snipers do today. British troops immediately charged the boys’ position and killed them both, but the British general would die shortly thereafter, with the command of the land forces going to his subordinate, the less-experienced Col. Arthur Brooke.

After artillery and musket duels on the road, Striker’s men pulled back as planned to a second position, escaping a British effort to outflank him, and felled trees along the way to slow the advance and buy time for the defenders back in Baltimore.

Now go to the far eastern end of Patterson Park. It’s just past the Burger King on Eastern Avenue. Stand in front of the monument to Polish Gen. Pulaski. (Sorry wrong war—he helped Washington’s army in the Revolution; his reward was to get one of the ugliest stretches of strip zoning in Baltimore named after him.) Then look to the northwest, and you’ll see a line of low hills rising up to 80 to 100 feet high at the center, which at the time was called Hampstead Hill. It’s amazing what you can see from the top of Hampstead Hill, even with the thousands of row homes and commercial buildings that have replaced the woods and fields of 1814. (Looking to the east from here, it was all water, woods, and farmland, except for a solitary house near the water.) Even today, with all that modern clutter, you can see Key Bridge, (which, of course, wasn’t there then), the huge cranes of the Port of Baltimore (also not there), and the mouth of the harbor itself. (Okay, that was there.)

As Stricker’s men slowed the British advancing up North Point Road, defenders put slaves and freemen to work digging fortifications along a line of defense, with Hampstead Hill at its center, that would eventually stretch over a mile, from Canton to Bel Air Road.

The highest point at Hampstead Hill, where the pagoda is now, was called Rodgers Bastion, after Commodore John Rodgers (Aye, maties, another salty dog, but from the regular Navy), who was at the center of a line of more than 10,000 Americans and dozens of cannon. Some of the guns are still there.

When the British Col. Brooke, turning off North Point Road west onto Philadelphia Road, saw what he was up against, he sensed it was pretty futile, but didn’t want to get on the bad side of Adm. Cockburn. First, he tried to outflank the Americans to the northwest, but was checked by troops under Stricker and by the now-subordinate Gen. Winder (thereby redeeming himself somewhat). Then Brooke sent a message to the fleet that he planned a night attack, but needed British ships to set up a diversion of gunfire from shallow-draft barges closer to shore than the main fleet. But the merchant sailors manning gun emplacements along the waterfront spotted the approaching British boats and repelled them in a pitch-black, pouring rain.

Brooke, who had already suffered heavy losses and was outnumbered 3-to-1 by entrenched defenders, knew that he was outgunned and that the American position was being reinforced every day by volunteers from all over Maryland and neighboring states. He withdrew back down North Point Road to rejoin the ships.

The British moved in toward the fort, with 16 ships, including rocket ships.

The ships stopped their bombardment of the fort on 7:30 a.m. on the 14th.

It was, of course, about this time that Francis Scott Key, a Maryland-born lawyer being detained by the British fleet during the attack, was inspired to write the lyrics that would later become the words to our national anthem.

With the death of Gen. Ross, the land invasion turned back, the fort’s flag—with its 15 stars and stripes—still flying after the long bombardment, and the harbor blocked, British signal flags ordered the departure of the fleet. By 9 a.m., all were under sail.

The fort had two flags, both made by seamstress Mary Pickersgill. She had been paid $574.44 (over $20,000 today) by the town fathers to make two flags, a massive 30- by 42-foot ensign and a smaller storm flag. The fort had been flying the storm flag through the bombardment and rain, but just as the British raised sail to leave Baltimore, Armistead ordered the mother of all flags raised and cannon fired.

In his book, Sheads quotes a letter written by a midshipman on a British ship recalling the scene: “Thus, after bombarding the forts and harbour of Baltimore for twenty-four hours . . . it was a galling spectacle for British sailors to behold. And, as the last vessel spread her canvas to the wind, the Americans hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery and fired at the same time a gun of defiance. It was with the batteries biding us defiance—the weather scowling with a thick drizzling rain upon our proceedings whilst our hearts and spirits were depressed in the extreme—that we retired down the Patapsco River with far different sensations from those we experienced on entering it . . . ”

Though there were subsequent defeats of British forces in New York State, the victory at Baltimore fired up national pride and abruptly changed the demands the British were making in peace talks in Belgium. In fact, a treaty favorable to American claims along the Canadian border was signed before the British fleet’s next humiliation—at New Orleans. (Word of the peace took weeks to cross the Atlantic.) In New Orleans, future President Andrew Jackson, defeated a larger British force with a crew that was at least as motley as Baltimore’s: In addition to a few regulars, it included frontiersmen, Native Americans, pirates (no, the really nasty, illegal kind), both free blacks and slaves, and Creoles.

So, what did the Battle of Baltimore change about America? Our sense of being American, says Sheads. “In 1814, the nation was only 36 years old, and people thought of themselves first as Marylanders or Virginians,” he says. “Merchant ships flew company flags, not the U.S. flag, which you’d only see at coastal defenses and on Navy ships.” But all the painted depictions of the victory and of the huge flag at Fort McHenry, Key’s song, and the great press Baltimore got after 1814 changed that. “The Battle of Baltimore really raised the role of the flag in the American consciousness. And it was the first time people started calling it the star-spangled banner. You started seeing the flag everywhere.”

Ken Iglehart is managing editor of special editions at Baltimore.

here’s a ton of events for all ages on tap in Baltimore for the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Here’s a roundup:

Wednesday, June 13

Head for the harbor to see a massive fleet of 13 towering tall ships, with their uniformed sailors lined up on the yardarms, arrive in Baltimore. Add the modern warships visiting town and there’ll be close to 40 in all, and the biggest include such majestic vessels as the Cisne Branco, a 250-foot-long, full-rigged tall ship of Brazil; the Dewaruci, a 191-foot barquentine crewed by Indonesian Navy cadets; the Cuauhtémoc, a 270-foot tall ship from Mexico; the Colombian Navy’s four-masted (23 sails), 257-foot-long Gloria; the Guayas, a 257-foot long tall ship of Ecuador; and our very own USCG Barque Eagle, the 290-foot globetrotting ambassador and sail training ship of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (Baltimore’s Curtis Bay Coast Guard Yard did the most recent refit of her), as well of lots of smaller ships like The Pride of Baltimore II and the Lady Maryland. The tall ships will be joined by modern warships from several countries and will be docked at the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Locust Point. Tours are available, but anyone touring a modern naval vessel will need to go through security similar to that at the airport, so leave your jack knife and ammo belt at home. Go to http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details about the participating ships.

Thursday, June 14 (Flag Day)

10 a.m.-4 p.m. Flag Day celebration at the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House , 844 E. Pratt St., 410-837-1793, info@flaghouse.org.

10:30-noon. Navy Ceremonial Band concert and welcome ceremony at the Inner Harbor Amphitheater. Starspangled200.com.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free Public Ship Tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point, Sailabration Villages open, check sailbaltimore.org for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point, checkhttp://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Friday, June 15

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point, checkhttp://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Saturday, June 16

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Star-Spangled Festival and Aircraft Display at Martin State Airport, Eastern Ave, Middle River. The main attraction will be the six FA-18 Hornets, flown by the U.S. Navy¹s Aerobatic Demonstration team, the Blue Angels, and the C-130 (Fat Albert) flown by the Marine Corps. When the Blues land after the air show, pilots will be signing autographs. There also will be other FA-18s, a E-2C Hawkeye, a T-45C Goshawk, a T-6B Texan, a T-34C Mentor, a P-3C Orion, MH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter, TH-57 Sea Ranger helicopter, and a MH-60 Seahawk helicopter. The Maryland Air National Guard will have one of their A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft on display as will the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum. Aircraft will begin departing Martin for the show in the early afternoon.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Afternoon TBD. Star-Spangled Air Show over Baltimore, featuring the Blue Angels. Best viewing location is Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

6-10 p.m. Celebration of the American Flag with concerts and fireworks at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

Sunday, June 17

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Star-Spangled Festival and Aircraft Display, Martin State Airport. See Saturday description above.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Afternoon TBD. Star-Spangled Air Show over Baltimore, featuring the Blue Angels. Best viewing location is Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

7-8:30 p.m. Star-Spangled Symphony by the BSO featuring the premiere of a new symphonic work, Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Bsomusic.org

Monday, June 18 (Actual anniversary of the Declaration of War)

Morning TBD. 200th anniversary event.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Tuesday, June 19

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Parade of Sail departure.

All weekend

On June 10, the Maryland Historical Society will open a new 1812 exhibition. The museum is at 201 W. Monument St., 410-685-3750. Check mdhs.org for hours, details.

Crystol Moll Gallery, 1030 S. Charles St., is hosting an exhibition of paintings, photographs and prints of Ft. McHenry, Flag House, and tall ships in honor or the War of 1812. May 23-July 7 with a reception June 15. See crystolmollgallery.com for details.