A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain
Boyle, with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the
enemy's coast and to make sport of the frigates which tried to
catch him. His Chasseur was considered one of the ablest
privateers of the war and the most beautiful vessel ever seen in
Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner with a magical turn for
speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders and carried a
hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never outsailed in
fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an admirer,
"she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of far
superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two
naval brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom.
During his first cruise in the Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured
eighteen valuable merchantmen. It was such defiant rovers as he
that provoked the "Morning Chronicle" of London to splutter "that
the whole coast of Ireland from Wexford round by Cape Clear
to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the
unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the
blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally
intolerable and disgraceful."

This was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's
cutter Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches;
when the Governor Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the
English Channel in quick succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore
cruised for three months off the Irish and English coasts and in
the Bay of Biscay, and returned to Boston filled with spoils,
including a half million dollars of money; when the Prince de
Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish Channel and made
coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of