very first exploit of the fleet was the capture,
on the nineteenth of March, 1776, of 150 cannon, 130 barrels of powder
and eight warships, which were carried in triumph into Long Island
Sound. But what of American heroism when the soldiers of Howe, of
Clinton, of Carleton, and of Gage came here to fight the farmers of
Pennsylvania, of Connecticut and Virginia, and the gay cavaliers who
loved adventure? The British soldiers had conquered India under Sir
Robert Clive and Sir Eyre Coote; they had been the heroes of Plassey and
Pondicherry; men who had subjected to British dominion a country almost
as extensive as our own fair republic and containing one hundred and
ninety millions of souls. Here they found themselves faced by men of
their own blood, men in whose breasts burned the spirit and the love of
that liberty which was to encircle the heavens. On the glory-crowned
heights of Bunker Hill the patriots gazed at the rafters of their own
burning dwellings in the town of Charlestown, and heard the cannon shots
hurled from British ships against the base of the hill. Three times did
scarlet regiments ascend that hill only to be driven back; the voice of
that idiot boy, Job Pray, ringing out above the din of battle, "Let them
come on to Breed's--the people will teach them the law."

When the evacuation by the British of the metropolis of New England was
effected by the troops under the command of a Virginia soldier, General
Washington, then for the first time did sectionalism and partisanship
and divisions on narrow lines vanish; the patriots who had fought at
Bunker Hill were now no longer to be known as the troops of
Massachusetts, of Connecticut, or of Rhode Island, but henceforth it was
the Continental Army. On the very day when the British were driven out
of Boston, John Paul Jones, with that historic rattlesnake flag, and,
floating above it, not the Stars and Stripes, but the Stripes with the
Union Jack, entered the waters of Great Britain; and then it was seen
that an American captain with an American ship and American sailors had
the pluck to push out into foreign seas and to beard the British lion in
his den. The same channel which had witnessed the victories of De Ruyter
and Von Tromp, which was the scene of Blake's victory over the Dutch,
and where the father of our great William Penn won his laurels as an
admiral, was now the scene of the exploits of an American captain
fighting beneath an American flag for Amer