It is a curious fact that no nation ever succeeded in imitating these craft.  The French went into privateering without in the least disturbing the equanimity of the British shipowner; but the day the Yankee privateers took the sea a cry went up from the docks and warehouses of Liverpool and London that reverberated among the arches of Westminster Hall.  The newspapers were loud in their attacks upon the admiralty authorities.  Said the Morning Chronicle in 1814: 

“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 wail may have resulted from the pleasantry of one Captain Boyle, of the privateer “Chasseur,” a famous Baltimore clipper, mounting sixteen guns, with a complement of one hundred officers, seamen, and marines.  Captain Boyle, after exhausting, as it seemed to him, the possibilities of the West Indies for excitement and profit, took up the English channel for his favorite cruising-ground.  One of the British devices of that day for the embarrassment of an enemy was what is called a “paper blockade.”  That is to say, when it appeared that the blockading fleet had too few vessels to make the blockade really effective by watching each port, the admiral commanding would issue a proclamation that such and such ports were in a state of blockade, and then withdraw his vessels from those ports; but still claim the right to capture any neutral vessels which he might encounter bound thither.  This practise is now universally interdicted by international law, which declares that a blockade, to be binding upon neutrals, must be effective.  But in those days England made her own international law—­for the sea, at any rate—­and the paper blockade was one of her pet weapons.  Captain Boyle satirized this practise by drawing up a formal proclamation of blockade of all the ports of Great Britain and Ireland, and sending it to Lloyds, where it was actually posted.  His action was not wholly a jest, either, for he did blockade the port of St. Vincent so effectively for five days that the inhabitants sent off a pitiful appeal to Admiral Durham to send a frigate to their relief.

It was at this time, too, that the Annual Register recorded as “a most mortifying reflection” that, with a navy of more than one thousand ships in commission, “it was not safe for a British vessel to sail without convoy from one part of the English or Irish Channel to another.”  Merchants held meetings, insurance corporations and boards of trade memorialized the government on the subject; the shipowners and merchants of Glasgow, in formal resolutions, called the attention of the admiralty