The weight of shot thrown by her at a single broadside would thus be two
hundred and twenty-five pounds. With regard to her crew, she started
from L'Orient with three hundred eighty men. She had manned several
prizes, which, with the desertion of the barge's crew on the coast of
Ireland, and the absence of those who went in pursuit under the master
and never returned, together with the fifteen men sent away in the
pilot-boat, under the second lieutenant, just before the action, and who
did not return until after it was over, reduced the crew, according to
Jones' statement, to three hundred forty men at its commencement.

This calculation seems a very fair one; for, by taking the statement of
those who had landed on the coast of Ireland, as given in a contemporary
English paper, at twenty-four, those who were absent in the pilot-boat
being sixteen in number, and allowing five of the nine prizes taken by
the Richard to have been manned from her, with average crews of five men
each, the total reduction from her original crew may be computed to be
seventy men. Eight or ten more escaped, during the action, in a boat
towing astern of the Serapis. To have had three hundred forty men at the
commencement of the action, as Jones states he had, he must have
obtained recruits from the crews of his prizes.

In the muster-roll of the Richard's crew in the battle, as given by Mr.
Sherburne from an official source, we find only two hundred twenty-seven
names. This can hardly have been complete; still the document is
interesting, inasmuch as it enumerates the killed and wounded by name,
there being forty-two killed and forty wounded. It also states the
country of most of the crew; by which it appears that there were
seventy-one Americans, fifty-seven acknowledged Englishmen, twenty-one
Portuguese, and the rest of the motley collection was made up of Swedes,
Norwegians, Irish, and East Indians. Many of those not named in this
imperfect muster-roll were probably Americans.

With regard to the Serapis, her battery consisted of twenty eighteens on
the lower gun-deck, twenty nines on the upper gun-deck, and ten sixes on
the quarter-deck and forecastle. She had two complete batteries, and her
construction was, in all respects, that of a line-of-battle ship. The
weight of shot thrown by her single broadside was three hundred pounds,
being seventy-five pounds more than that of the Richard. Her crew
consisted of three hundred twenty; all Englis