ost impossible to obtain food supplies for the
northern department of the Continental army.

Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with the New
York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as promptly sent her
into port. He then ran offshore and picked up and carried into Boston
two English privateers headed for New York with large cargoes of
merchandise from the West Indies. But he was particularly anxious to
square accounts with a renegade Captain Hazard who made Newport his base
and had captured many American vessels with the stout brig King George,
using her for "the base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and
friends."

On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered the
perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and riddled her
with one broadside after another, first hailing Captain Hazard by name
and cursing him in double-shotted phrases for the traitorous swab that
he was. Then the seagoing infantry scrambled over the bulwarks and
tumbled the Tories down their own hatches without losing a man. A prize
crew with the humiliated King George made for New London, where there
was much cheering in the port, and "even the women, both young and old,
expressed the greatest joy."

With no very heavy fighting, Talbot had captured five vessels and was
keen to show what his crew could do against mettlesome foemen. He found
them at last well out to sea in a large ship which seemed eager to
engage him. Only a few hundred feet apart through a long afternoon, they
briskly and cheerily belabored each other with grape and solid shot.
Talbot's speaking-trumpet was shot out of his hand, the tails of his
coat were shorn off, and all the officers and men stationed with him on
the quarter-deck were killed or wounded.

His crew reported that the Argo was in a sinking condition, with the
water flooding the gun-deck, but he told them to lower a man or two in
the bight of a line and they pluckily plugged the holes from overside.
There was a lusty huzza when the Englishman's mainmast crashed to
the deck and this finished the affair. Silas Talbot found that he had
trounced the privateer Dragon, of twice his own tonnage and with the
advantage in both guns and men.

While his crew was patching the Argo and pumping the water from her
hold, the lookout yelled that another sail was making for them. Without
hesitation Talbot somehow got this absurdly impudent one-masted craft
of his u