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Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge;Theodore Roosevelt
page 68 of 188 (36%)
of the French ports, and so hopeless were the French of making
headway in battle with their antagonists, that not only the great
French three-deckers 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, France, and Spain. Here the water was
traversed continually by English fleets and squadrons and single
ships of war, which were sometimes covoying detachments of troops
for Wellington's Peninsular army, sometimes guarding fleets of
merchant vessels bound homeward, and sometimes merely cruising
for foes. It was this spot, right in the teeth of the British
naval power, that the Wasp chose for her cruising ground. Hither
and thither she sailed through the narrow seas, capturing and
destroying the merchantmen, and by the seamanship of her crew and
the skill and vigilance of her commander, escaping the pursuit of
frigate and ship of the line. Before she had been long on the
ground, one June morning, while in chase of a couple of merchant
ships, she spied a sloop of war, the British brig Reindeer, of
eighteen guns and a hundred and twenty men. The Reindeer was a
weaker ship than the Wasp, her guns were lighter, and her men
fewer; but her commander, Captain Manners, was one of the most
gallant men in the splendid British navy, and he promptly took up
the gage of battle which the Wasp threw down.

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