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: "This he did with great
ease by going alongside of each of them, one after the other."

One more story of this master sea-rover of the Revolution, sailor
and gentleman, who served his country so much more brilliantly
than many a landsman lauded in the written histories of the war.