A crash as when some swollen cloud But what is she whose streaming bars Ah, well her iron ribs are knit, The bellowing throats, the blazing lips, And, wavering from its haughty peak, The cross of England fell ! -Holmes. THE CRUISE OF THE "WASP " N the war of 1812 the little American navy, including only a dozen frigates and sloops of war, won a series of victories against the English, the hitherto undoubted masters of the sea, that attracted an attention altogether out of proportion to the force of the combatants or the actual damage done. For one hundred and fifty years the English ships of war had failed to find fit rivals in those of any other European power, although they had been matched against each in turn; and when the unknown navy of the new nation growing up across the Atlantic did what no European navy had ever been able to do, not only the English and Americans, but the people of Continental Europe as well, regarded the feat as important out of all proportion to the material aspects of the The Americans first proved that the English could be beaten at their own game on the sea. They did what the huge fleets of France, Spain, and Holland had failed to do, and the great case. modern writers on naval warfare in Continental Europe- men like Jurien de la Gravière-have paid the same attention to these contests of frigates and sloops that they give to whole fleet actions of other wars. Among the famous ships of the Americans in this war were two named the Wasp. The first was an eighteen-gun ship-sloop, which at the very outset of the war captured a British brig-sloop of twenty guns, after an engagement in which the British fought with great gallantry, but were knocked to pieces, while the Americans escaped comparatively unscathed. Immediately afterward a British seventy-four captured the victor. In memory of her the Americans gave the same name to one of the new sloops they were building. These sloops were stoutly made, speedy vessels which in strength and swiftness compared favorably with any ships of their class in any other navy of the day, for the American shipwrights were already as famous as the American gunners and seamen. The new Wasp, like her sister ships, carried twenty-two guns and a crew of one hundred and seventy men, and was ship-rigged. Twenty of her guns were 32-pound carronades, while for bow-chasers she had two "long Toms." It was in the year 1814 that the Wasp sailed from the United States to prey on the navy and commerce of Great Britain. Her commander was a gallant South Carolinian named Captain Johnson Blakeley. Her crew were nearly all native Americans, and were an exceptionally fine set of men. Instead of staying near the American coasts or of sailing the high seas, the Wasp at once headed boldly for the English Channel, to carry the war to the very doors of the enemy. At that time the English fleets had destroyed the navies of every other power of Europe, and had obtained such complete supremacy over the French that the French fleets were kept in port. Off these ports lay the great squadrons of the English ships of the line, never, in gale or in calm, relaxing their watch upon the rival war-ships of the French emperor. So close was the blockade of the French ports, and so hopeless were the French of making headway in battle with their antagonists, that not only the great French threedeckers and two-deckers, but their frigates and sloops as well, lay harmless in their harbors, and the English ships patroled the seas unchecked in every direction. A few French privateers still slipped out now and then, and the far bolder and more formidable American privateersmen drove hither and thither across the ocean in their swift schooners and brigantines, and harried the English commerce without mercy. The Wasp proceeded at once to cruise in the English Channel and off the coasts of England, |