dventure, and shared its full dangers and glories.

Lawrence was also engaged in the Enterprise, in Preble's bombardment
of Tripoli, the same year. He returned in the winter to the United
States, with that commodore, in the John Adams. In the following
spring of 1805, Lawrence successfully carried across the Atlantic one
of the fleet of gunboats, No. 6, of which he was commander, destined
for service in the Mediterranean. It was a small vessel, mounting two
guns, not at all adapted for ocean navigation. The voyage was looked
upon as a marvel. When near the Western Islands, Mr. Cooper, in his
"Naval History" tells, he "fell in with the British frigate Lapwing,
28, Captain Upton which ran for him, under the impression that the
gunboat was some wrecked mariners on a raft, there being a great show
of canvas and apparently no hull."

After the war with Tripoli was ended, Lawrence returned to the United
States, and in the interval, when the war with England, after the
affair with the Leopard and Chesapeake, was daily becoming more
imminent, we find him, in 1808, appointed first lieutenant of the
Constitution. About the same time he married Miss Montaudevert, the
daughter of a respectable merchant of New York. He was on duty in the
Vixen, Wasp, and Argus; and, at the commencement of the war of 1812,
was promoted to the command of the Hornet. While in this last vessel
he sailed with Bainbridge, who had the flag-ship Constitution, on a
cruise along the coast of South America, and, having occasion to look
in at the port of San Salvador, found there the British sloop-of-war,
Bonne Citoyenne, of eighteen guns, ready to sail for England with a
large amount of specie. Lawrence, whose ship mounted an equal number
of guns, was exceedingly anxious to engage with this vessel. He sent a
challenge to its commander, Captain Green, through the American
consul, inviting him to "come out," and pledging his honor that
neither the Constitution, nor any other American vessel, should
interfere, which Commodore Bainbridge seconded by promising to be out
of the way, or at least non-combatant. The English captain, however,
declined.

It was an unhappy precedent which Lawrence thus established, injurious
to the service and destined to act fatally against himself in the end,
when from the challenger he became the challenged.

The Constitution meanwhile sailed away, to close the year with her
brilliant engagement with the Java, leaving the Hornet en