* * *

The British press foamed almost deliriously over these disasters to their
navy, which robbed of half its luxury the imminent downfall of Napoleon.
The London "Times" could hardly find words to express its emotion over
the fact that five hundred merchantmen and three frigates; had been
captured in seven months by the Americans. An attempt was made to explain
the repeated and astounding defeats on the ocean by the plea that the
American frigates were almost ships of the line in disguise, and that
their superior size and armament carried an unfair advantage. The same
plea could not be offered in explanation of the victories won by American
sloops, in the case of the American Hornet and British Peacock, of about
equal strength, while the American Wasp was considerably inferior in guns
and weight of metal to the British Frolic. Master-Commandant James
Lawrence, of the Hornet, captured the Peacock in eleven minutes from the
beginning of the action, the American guns being fired so rapidly that
buckets of water were constantly dashed on them to keep them cool. A
Halifax paper said that "a vessel moored for the purpose of experiment
could not have been sunk sooner. It will not do for our vessels to fight
theirs single-handed." The American eighteen-gun sloop-of-war Wasp,
Master-Commandant Jacob Jones, had a longer fight with the British
brig-of-war Frolic, twenty-two guns, Captain Thomas Whinyates. The action
lasted forty-three minutes from the first broadside, and the Frolic was
taken by boarding. The Wasp had five killed and five wounded, and the
Frolic fifteen killed and forty-seven wounded. The fact is, it was not
the number but the handling of the guns that won American victories.

The capture of the American forty-nine-gun frigate Chesapeake, Captain
James Lawrence, by the British fifty-two-gun frigate Shannon, Captain
Philip Bowes Vere Broke, consoled the English in some degree for their
losses, and the very exultation with which the news was received in Great
Britain showed the high estimate which the mistress of the seas had
formed of the American navy from previous experience during the war.
It is but just to the gallant Lawrence to say that he had no fair
opportunity to prepare for battle, that he had the poorest crew--largely
Portuguese and other riff-raff--ever put on board an American man-of-war,
and that with a crew such as Hull or Decatur or Bainbridge had commanded,
or that he had hi