trade of the St.
Lawrence to proceed without convoy, the chance of captures upon an
extensive scale is very flattering." He added the just remark, that
"it is impossible to conceive a naval service of a higher order in a
national point of view than the destruction of the enemy's vessels,
with supplies for his army in Canada and his fleets on this
station."[132]

Lawrence took command of the "Chesapeake" at Boston on May 20. The
ship had returned from her last cruise April 9, and had been so far
prepared for sea by her former commander that, as has been seen, her
sailing orders were issued May 6. It would appear from the statement
of the British naval historian James,[133] based upon a paper captured
in the ship, that the enlistments of her crew expired in April.
Although there were many reshipments, and a nucleus of naval seamen,
there was a large infusion of new and untrained men, amounting to a
reconstitution of the ship's company. More important still was the
fact that both the captain and first lieutenant were just appointed;
her former first lying fatally ill at the time she sailed. The third
and fourth lieutenants were also strange to her, and in a manner to
their positions; being in fact midshipmen, to whom acting appointments
as lieutenants were issued at Lawrence's request, by Commodore
Bainbridge of the navy yard, on May 27, five days before the action.
The third took charge of his division for the first time the day of
the battle, and the men were personally unknown to him. The first
lieutenant himself was extremely young.

The bearing of these facts is not to excuse the defeat, but to enforce
the lesson that a grave military enterprise is not to be hazarded on a
side issue, or on a point of pride, without adequate preparation. The
"Chesapeake" was ordered to a service of very particular importance at
the moment--May, 1813--when the Canada campaign was about to open. She
was to act against the communications of the enemy; and while it is
upon the whole more expedient, for the _morale_ of a service, that
battle with an equal should not be declined, quite as necessarily
action should not be sought when it will materially interfere with the
discharge of a duty intrinsically of greater consequence. The capture
of a single enemy's frigate is not to be confounded with, or inflated
to, that destruction of an enemy's organized force which is the prime
object of all military effort. Indeed, the very purpose to which