to the fact that “in the short space of twenty-four months above eight hundred vessels have been captured by the power whose maritime strength we have hitherto impolitically held in contempt.”  It was, indeed, a real blockade of the British Isles that was effected by these irregular and pigmy vessels manned by the sailors of a nation that the British had long held in high scorn.  The historian Henry Adams, without attempting to give any complete list of captures made on the British coasts in 1814, cites these facts: 

“The ‘Siren,’ a schooner of less than 200 tons, with seven guns and seventy-five men, had an engagement with His Majesty’s cutter ‘Landrail,’ of four guns, as the cutter was crossing the Irish sea with dispatches.  The ‘Landrail’ was captured, after a somewhat smart action, and was sent to America, but was recaptured on the way.  The victory was not remarkable, but the place of capture was very significant, and it happened July 12 only a fortnight after Blakely captured the ‘Reindeer’ farther westward.  The ‘Siren’ was but one of many privateers in those waters.  The ‘Governor Tompkins’ burned fourteen vessels successively in the British Channel.  The ‘Young Wasp,’ of Philadelphia, cruised nearly six months about the coasts of England and Spain, and in the course of West India commerce.  The ‘Harpy,’ of Baltimore, another large vessel of some 350 tons and fourteen guns, cruised nearly three months off the coast of Ireland, in the British Channel, and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned safely to Boston filled with plunder, including, as was said, upward of L100,000 in British treasury notes and bills of exchange.  The ‘Leo,’ a Boston schooner of about 200 tons, was famous for its exploits in these waters, but was captured at last by the frigate ‘Tiber,’ after a chase of about eleven hours.  The ‘Mammoth,’ a Baltimore schooner of nearly 400 tons, was seventeen days off Cape Clear, the southernmost point of Ireland.  The most mischievous of all was the ’Prince of Neufchatel,’ New York, which chose the Irish Channel as its favorite haunt, where during the summer it made ordinary coasting traffic impossible.”

The vessels enumerated by Mr. Adams were by no means among the more famous of the privateers of the War of 1812; yet when we come to examine their records we find something notable or something romantic in the career of each—­a fact full of suggestion of the excitement of the privateersman’s life.  The “Leo,” for example, at this time was under command of Captain George Coggeshall, the foremost of all the privateers, and a man who so loved his calling that he wrote an excellent book about it.  Under an earlier commander she made several most profitable cruises, and when purchased by Coggeshall’s associates was lying in a French port.  France and England were then at peace, and it may be that the French remembered the way in which we had suppressed the Citizen Genet.  At any rate, they refused to let Coggeshall take his ship out of the harbor with