eel convinced that it is only by repeated
triumphs in even combat that your little navy can now hope to console
your country for the loss of that trade it cannot protect."[128] The
taunt, doubtless intended to further the object of the letter by the
provocation involved, was applicable as well to coasting as to
deep-sea commerce. It ignored, however, the consideration, necessarily
predominant with American officers, that the conditions of the war
imposed commerce destruction as the principal mission of their navy.
They were not indeed to shun combat, when it offered as an incident,
but neither were they to seek it as a mere means of glory,
irrespective of advantage to be gained. Lawrence, whom Broke's letter
did not reach, was perhaps not sufficiently attentive to this motive.

The British blockade, military and commercial, the coastwise
operations of their navy, and the careers of American cruisers
directed to the destruction of British commerce, are then the three
heads under which the ocean activities of 1813 divide. Although this
chapter is devoted to the first two of these subjects, brief mention
should be made here of the distant cruises of two American vessels,
because, while detached from any connection with other events, they
are closely linked, in time and place, with the disastrous seaboard
engagement between the "Chesapeake" and "Shannon," with which the
account of sea-coast maritime operations opens. On April 30 Captain
John Rodgers put to sea from Boston in the frigate "President,"
accompanied by the frigate "Congress," Captain John Smith. Head winds
immediately after sailing detained them inside of Cape Cod until May
3, and it was not till near George's Bank that any of the blockading
squadron was seen. As, by the Admiralty's instructions, one of the
blockaders was usually a ship of the line, the American vessels very
properly evaded them. The two continued together until May 8, when
they separated, some six hundred miles east of Delaware Bay. Rodgers
kept along northward to the Banks of Newfoundland, hoping, at that
junction of commercial highways, to fall in with a West India convoy,
or vessels bound into Halifax or the St. Lawrence. Nothing, however,
was seen, and he thence steered to the Azores with equal bad fortune.
Obtaining thereabouts information of a homeward-bound convoy from the
West Indies, he went in pursuit to the northeast, but failed to find
it. Not till June 9 did he make three captures,