his
first cruise in the Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured eighteen valuable
merchantmen. It was such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning
Chronicle" of London to splutter "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 was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's cutter
Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches; when the Governor
Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the English Channel in quick
succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore cruised for three months off
the Irish and English coasts and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned to
Boston filled with spoils, including a half million dollars of money;
when the Prince de Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish
Channel and made coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of
Philadelphia cruised for six months in those same waters.

Two of the privateers mentioned were first-class fighting ships whose
engagements were as notable, in their way, as those of the American
frigates which made the war as illustrious by sea as it was ignominious
by land. While off Havana in 1815, Captain Boyle met the schooner St.
Lawrence of the British Navy, a fair match in men and guns. The Chasseur
could easily have run away but stood up to it and shot the enemy
to pieces in fifteen minutes. Brave and courteous were these two
commanders, and Lieutenant Gordon of the St. Lawrence gave his captor a
letter which read, in part: "In the event of Captain Boyle's becoming
a prisoner of war to any British cruiser I consider it a tribute justly
due to his humane and generous treatment of myself, the surviving
officers, and crew of His Majesty's late schooner St. Lawrence, to state
that his obliging attention and watchful solicitude to preserve our
effects and render us comfortable during the short time we were in his
possession were such as justly entitle him to the indulgence and respect
of every British subject."

The Prince de Neuchatel had the honor of beating off the attack of a
forty-gun British frigate--an exploit second only to that of the General
Armstrong in the harbor of Fayal. This privateer with a foreign name
hailed from New York and was so fortunate as to capture for her owners
three million dollars'