fire."

It was, indeed, a memorable sea-picture, the sturdy Pickering riding
deep with her burden of sugar and seeming smaller than she really was,
the Achilles towering like a frigate, and all Bilbao turned out to
watch the duel, shore and headlands crowded with spectators, the blue
harbor-mouth gay with an immense flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure
craft. The stake for which Haraden fought was to retake the Golden
Eagle prize and to gain his port. His seamanship was flawless. Vastly
outnumbered if it should come to boarding, he handled his vessel so as
to avoid the Achilles while he poured the broadsides into her. After two
hours the London privateer emerged from the smoke which had obscured the
combat and put out to sea in flight, hulled through and through, while
a farewell flight of crowbars, with which the guns of the Pickering had
been crammed to the muzzle, ripped through her sails and rigging.

Haraden hoisted canvas and drove in chase, but the Achilles had the
heels of him "with a mainsail as large as a ship of the line," and
reluctantly he wore ship and, with the Golden Eagle again in his
possession, he sailed to an anchorage in Bilbao harbor. The Spanish
populace welcomed him with tremendous enthusiasm. He was carried through
the streets in a holiday procession and was the hero of banquets and
public receptions.

Such a man was bound to be the idol of his sailors and one of them quite
plausibly related that "so great was the confidence he inspired that if
he but looked at a sail through his glass and told the helmsman to steer
for her, the observation went round,'If she is an enemy, she is ours.'"

It was in this same General Pickering, no longer sugar-laden but in
cruising trim, that Jonathan Haraden accomplished a feat which Paul
Jones might have been proud to claim. There lifted above the sky-line
three armed merchantmen sailing in company from Halifax to New York, a
brig of fourteen guns, a ship of sixteen guns, a sloop of twelve guns.
When they flew signals and formed in line, the ship alone appeared
to outmatch the Pickering, but Haraden, in that lordly manner of his,
assured his men that "he had no doubt whatever that if they would
do their duty he would quickly capture the three vessels." Here
was performance very much out of the ordinary, naval strategy of an
exceptionally high order, and yet it is dismissed by the only witness
who took the trouble to mention it in these few, casual words: "