at sea, after a British naval lieutenant had picked the best of her crew on the pretense that they were British subjects.  The superficial differences between an American and an Englishman not being as great as those between an albino and a Congo black, it is not surprising that the boarding officer should occasionally make mistakes—­particularly when his ship was in need of smart, active sailors.  Indeed, in those years the civilized—­by which at that period was meant the warlike—­nations were all seeking sailors.  Dutch, Spanish, French, and English were eager for men to man their fighting ships; hired them when they could, and stole them when they must.  It was the time of the press gang, and the day when sailors carried as a regular part of their kit an outfit of women’s clothing in which to escape if the word were passed that “the press is hot to-night.”  The United States had never to resort to impressment to fill its navy ships’ companies, a fact perhaps due chiefly to the small size of its navy in comparison with the seafaring population it had to draw from.

As for the American merchant marine, it was full of British seamen.  Beyond doubt inducements were offered them at every American port to desert and ship under the Stars and Stripes.  In the winter of 1801 every British ship visiting New York lost the greater part of its crew.  At Norfolk the entire crew of a British merchantman deserted to an American sloop-of-war.  A lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up.  Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen, born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries, able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship.  They were fighting sailors, too, though serving only in the merchant marine.  In those days the men that went down to the sea in ships had to be prepared to fight other antagonists than Neptune and AEolus.  All the ships went armed.  It is curious to read in old annals of the number of cannon carried by small merchantmen.  We find the “Prudent Sarah” mounting 10 guns; the “Olive Branch,” belied her peaceful name with 3, while the pink “Friendship” carried 8.  These years, too, were the privateers’ harvest time.  During the Revolution the ships owned by one Newburyport merchant took 23,360 tons of shipping and 225 men, the prizes with their cargoes selling for $3,950,000.  But of the size and the profits of the privateering business more will be said in the chapter devoted to that subject.  It is enough to note here that it made the American merchantman essentially a fighting man.