arried
sail in winds so strong that the lumbering English East Indiamen were
hove to or snugged down to reefed topsails. It was not recklessness but
better seamanship. The deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this
assertion to the hilt. Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred
prizes taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty
million dollars in ships and cargoes. There were, all told, more
than five hundred of them in commission, but New England no longer
monopolized this dashing trade. Instead of Salem it was Baltimore that
furnished the largest fleet--fifty-eight vessels, many of them the fast
ships and schooners which were to make the port famous as the home
of the Baltimore clipper model. All down the coast, out of Norfolk,
Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, sallied the
privateers to show that theirs was, in truth, a seafaring nation
ardently united in a common cause.

Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their voices in
protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly romped to and fro
in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting a blockade of their own
until London was paying the famine price of fifty-eight dollars a barrel
for flour, and it was publicly declared mortifying and distressing
that "a horde of American cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and
unmolested, to take, burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and
almost in sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the
Chasseur of Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation of a
blockade of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he
requested should be posted in Lloyd's Coffee House.

A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain Boyle,
with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the enemy's coast
and to make sport of the frigates which tried to catch him. His Chasseur
was considered one of the ablest privateers of the war and the most
beautiful vessel ever seen in Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner
with a magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders
and carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never
outsailed in fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an
admirer, "she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of
far superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval
brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom. During