I think I may say, without boasting unreasonably of my own good sense, that I have kept myself altogether aloof from the vortex of parties, from boyhood to the present hour.  My father had been a federalist, but a federalist a good deal cooled off, from having seen foreign countries, and no attempts had ever been made to make me believe that black was white in the interest of either faction.  I knew that impressment from foreign vessels, out of the waters of Great Britain at least, could be defended on no other ground but that of power; and as for colonial produce, and all the subtleties that were dependent on its transportation, I fancied that a neutral had a perfect right to purchase of one belligerent and sell to another, provided he found it his interest so to do, and he violated no positive—­not paper—­blockade, or did not convey articles that are called contraband of war.

With these views, then, it is not surprising that I easily came into the pilot’s opinion, and determined to give the Leander a sufficient berth, as sailors express it.

The Leander was a fifty, on two decks, a very silly sort of a craft; though she had manfully played her part at the Nile, and on one or two other rather celebrated occasions, and was a good vessel of the build.  Still, I felt certain the Dawn could get away from her, under tolerably favourable circumstances, The Leander afterwards became notorious, on the American coast, in consequence of a man killed in a coaster by one of her shot, within twenty miles of the spot where I now saw her; an event that had its share in awakening the feeling that produced the war of 1812; a war of which the effects are just beginning to be made manifest in the policy of the republic:  a fact, by-the-way, that is little understood, at home or abroad.  The Leander was a fast ship of her kind, but the Dawn was a fast ship of any kind; and I had great faith in her.  It is true, the fifty had the advantage of the wind; but she was a long way off, well to the southward, and might have something in sight that could not be seen even from our top-gallant yards, whither Neb was sent to take a look at the horizon.

Our plan was soon laid.  The south side of Long Island trending a little to the north of east, I ordered the ship to be steered east by south, which, with the wind at south-south-west, gave me an opportunity to carry all our studding-sails.  The soundings were as regular as the ascent on the roof of a shed, or on that of a graded lawn; and the land in sight less than two leagues distant.  In this manner we ran down the coast, with about six knots’ way on the ship, as soon as we got from under the Jersey shore.