, insulted, or perhaps
impressed in British privateers. The ships were lost to their owners.
There was no appeal and no redress. At Martinique an English fleet and
army captured St. Pierre in February, 1794. Files of marines boarded
every American ship in the harbor, tore down the colors, and flung two
hundred and fifty seamen into the foul holds of a prison hulk. There
they were kept, half-dead with thirst and hunger while their vessels,
uncared for, had stranded or sunk at their moorings. Scores of outrages
as abominable as this were on record in the office of the Secretary of
State. Shipmasters were afraid to sail to the southward and, for lack
of these markets for dried cod, the fishing schooners of Marblehead were
idle.

For a time a second war with England seemed imminent. An alarmed
Congress passed laws to create a navy and to fortify the most important
American harbors. President Washington recommended an embargo of thirty
days, which Congress promptly voted and then extended for thirty
more. It was a popular measure and strictly enforced by the mariners
themselves. The mates and captains of the brigs and snows in the
Delaware River met and resolved not to go to sea for another ten days,
swearing to lie idle sooner than feed the British robbers in the West
Indies. It was in the midst of these demonstrations that Washington
seized the one hope of peace and recommended a special mission to
England.

The treaty negotiated by John Jay in 1794 was received with an outburst
of popular indignation. Jay was damned as a traitor, while the sailors
of Portsmouth burned him in effigy. By way of an answer to the terms of
the obnoxious treaty, a seafaring mob in Boston raided and burned
the British privateer Speedwell, which had put into that port as a
merchantman with her guns and munitions hidden beneath a cargo of West
India produce.

The most that can be said of the commercial provisions of the treaty is
that they opened direct trade with the East Indies but at the price of
complete freedom of trade for British shipping in American ports. It
must be said, too, that although the treaty failed to clear away the
gravest cause of hostility--the right of search and impressment--yet it
served to postpone the actual dash, and during the years in which it was
in force American shipping splendidly prospered, freed of most irksome
handicaps.

The quarrel with France had been brewing at the same time and for
similar reasons. N