rious aspect. Continued reverses on the ocean
had roused the British ministry to the fact that they were dealing
with no contemptible enemy, and the word had gone forth that the
Americans must be crushed into submission. Troops were hurriedly sent
to Canada, and all the vessels that could be spared were ordered to
the coast of the United States. The English had determined upon that
most effective of all hostile measures,--a rigorous blockade of their
enemy's coast. Up and down the coast from New Jersey to the Carolinas,
British frigates and sloops kept up a constant patrol. Chesapeake Bay
was their chief rendezvous; and the exploits of the blockading
squadron stationed there, under Admiral Cockburn, led often to scenes
more befitting savage warfare then the hostilities of two enlightened
and civilized peoples. On the New England coast, the blockade was less
severely enforced. The people of that section had been loud in their
denunciations of the war; and the British hoped, by a display of
moderation, to seduce the New Englanders from their allegiance to the
United States,--a hope that failed utterly of fulfilment. Even had the
British desired to enforce the blockade along the New England shore,
the character of the coast, and the skill and shrewdness of the Yankee
skippers, would have made the task of the blockaders a most difficult
one.

The annals of the little seafaring-villages along the coast of Maine
and Massachusetts abound in anecdotes of hardy skippers who outwitted
the watchful British, and ran their little schooners or sloops into
port under the very guns of a blockading man-of-war.

Among the blockade-runners of the New England coast, Capt. Dan Fernald
of Portsmouth stood foremost. When a shipload of Maine timber was
needed at the Portsmouth navy-yard, to be converted into a new
man-of-war, to Capt. Fernald was assigned the task of bringing it down
from Portland past the British frigates, that were ever on the watch
for just such cargoes. When the preparations for the building of the
seventy-four-gun ship "Washington" were making at the navy-yard, Capt.
Fernald was sent to Portsmouth for a load of ship's-timber. His cargo
was to consist of forty-eight "knees" and the breast-hook of the
seventy-four. Loaded down with this burden, the schooner "Sally" left
Portland, and headed for her destination. Caution led her captain to
keep his craft close to the shore, and for a day or two she crept
along the coast wit