dy cost the British squadron one hundred and twenty men in
killed and one hundred and thirty in wounded, while Captain Reid lost
only two dead and had seven wounded. He was compelled to retreat ashore
next day when the ships stood in to sink his schooner with their big
guns, but the honors of war belonged to him and well-earned were the
popular tributes when he saw home again, nor was there a word too much
in the florid toast: "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of
renown upon the character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of
eternal bloom."

It is not to glorify war nor to rekindle an ancient feud that such
episodes as these are recalled to mind. These men, and others like them,
did their duty as it came to them, and they were sailors of whom
the whole Anglo-Saxon race might be proud. In the crisis they were
Americans, not privateersmen in quest of plunder, and they would gladly
die sooner than haul down the Stars and Stripes. The England against
which they fought was not the England of today. Their honest grievances,
inflicted by a Government too intent upon crushing Napoleon to be fair
to neutrals, have long ago been obliterated. This War of 1812 cleared
the vision of the Mother Country and forever taught her Government that
the people of the Republic were, in truth, free and independent.

This lesson was driven home not only by the guns of the Constitution and
the United States, but also by the hundreds of privateers and the forty
thousand able seamen who were eager to sail in them. They found no great
place in naval history, but England knew their prowess and respected it.
Every schoolboy is familiar with the duels of the Wasp and the Frolic,
of the Enterprise and the Boxer; but how many people know what happened
when the privateer Decatur met and whipped the Dominica of the British
Navy to the southward of Bermuda?

Captain Diron was the man who did it as he was cruising out of
Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1813. Sighting an armed
schooner slightly heavier than his own vessel, he made for her and was
unperturbed when the royal ensign streamed from her gaff. Clearing for
action, he closed the hatches so that none of his men could hide below.
The two schooners fought in the veiling smoke until the American could
ram her bowsprit over the other's stern and pour her whole crew aboard.
In the confined space of the deck, almost two hundred men and lads were
slashing and stabbing and sho