ver
devised. Mob violence opposed it again and again, and British East
Indiamen fought the King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their
crews and left helpless. Feeling in America against impressment was
never more highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than
it had long been in England itself, although the latter country was
unable to rise and throw it off. Here are the words, not of an angry
American patriot but of a modern English historian writing of his own
nation: * "To the people the impress was an axe laid at the foot of the
tree. There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of
hands who could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its
natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs
were the tentacles, struck at the very foundations of domestic life and
brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as
poignant as death. ... The mutiny at the Nore brought the people face to
face with the appalling risks attendant on wholesale pressing while the
war with America, incurred for the sole purpose of upholding the right
to press, taught them the lengths to which their rulers were still
prepared to go in order to enslave them." *

* The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, by J. R. Hutchinson.

CHAPTER VII. THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812

American privateering in 1812 was even bolder and more successful than
during the Revolution. It was the work of a race of merchant seamen who
had found themselves, who were in the forefront of the world's trade and
commerce, and who were equipped to challenge the enemy's pretensions to
supremacy afloat. Once more there was a mere shadow of a navy to protect
them, but they had learned to trust their own resources. They would send
to sea fewer of the small craft, slow and poorly armed, and likely to
meet disaster. They were capable of manning what was, in fact, a
private navy comprised of fast and formidable cruisers. The intervening
generation had advanced the art of building and handling ships beyond
all rivalry, and England grudgingly acknowledged their ability. The year
of 1812 was indeed but a little distance from the resplendent modern era
of the Atlantic packet and the Cape Horn clipper.

Already these Yankee deep-water ships could be recognized afar by their
lofty spars and snowy clouds of cotton duck beneath which the slender
hull was a thin black line. Far up to the gleaming royals they c