life, "Tom
Cringle's Log," which, though in form a work of fiction, contains so many
accounts of actual happenings, and expresses so fully the ideas of the
British naval officer of that time, that it may well be quoted in a work
of historical character. Tom Cringle, after detailing with a lively
description the capture of a Yankee privateer, says that she was assigned
to him for his next command. He had seen her under weigh, had admired her
trim model, her tapering spars, her taut cordage, and the swiftness with
which she came about and reached to windward. He thus describes the change
the British outfitters made in her:

"When I had last seen her she was the most beautiful little
craft, both in hull and rigging, that ever delighted the eyes of
a sailor; but the dock yard riggers and carpenters had fairly
bedeviled her at least so far as appearances went. First, they
had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy, solid
bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at least
another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel, that
formerly floated on the foam light as a seagull, now looked like
a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long, slender wands of
masts, which used to swing about as if there were neither
shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as
church-steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays,
and back-stays, and the devil knows what all."

It is a curious fact that no nation ever succeeded in imitating these
craft. The French went into privateering without in the least disturbing
the equanimity of the British shipowner; but the day the Yankee privateers
took the sea a cry went up from the docks and warehouses of Liverpool and
London that reverberated among the arches of Westminster Hall. The
newspapers were loud in their attacks upon the admiralty authorities. Said
the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1814:

"That the whole coast of Ireland, from Wexford round by Cape
Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under
the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the
blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally
intolerable and disgraceful."

This wail may have resulted from the pleasantry of one Captain Boyle, of
the privateer "Chasseur," a famous Baltimore clipper, mounting sixteen
guns, with a complement of one hundred officers, seamen, and marines.