the slender hull was a thin black line. Far up to the gleaming
royals they carried sail in winds so strong that the lumbering
English East Indiamen were hove to or snugged down to reefed
topsails. It was not recklessness but better seamanship. The
deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this assertion to
the hilt. Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred prizes
taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty
million dollars in ships and cargoes. There were, all told, more
than five hundred of them in commission, but New England no
longer monopolized this dashing trade. Instead of Salem it was
Baltimore that furnished the largest fleet--fifty-eight vessels,
many of them the fast ships and schooners which were to make the
port famous as the home of the Baltimore clipper model. All down
the coast, out of Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and
New Orleans, sallied the privateers to show that theirs was, in
truth, a seafaring nation ardently united in a common cause.

Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their
voices in protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly
romped to and fro in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting
a blockade of their own until London was paying the famine price
of fifty-eight dollars a barrel for flour, and it was publicly
declared mortifying and distressing that "a horde of American
cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and unmolested, to take,
burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and almost in
sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the
Chasseur of Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation
of a blockade of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
which he requested should be posted in Lloyd's Coffee House.