hambles of her deck and did it with the loss of one man.

Even more sensational was the last cruise of the _Wasp_, Captain
Johnston Blakely, which sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in May
and roamed the English Channel to the dismay of all honest British
merchantmen. The brig-of-war _Reindeer_ endeavored to put an end to her
career but nineteen minutes sufficed to finish an action in which the
_Wasp_ slaughtered half the British crew and thrice repelled boarders.
This was no light task, for as Michael Scott, the British author of _Tom
Cringle's Log_, candidly expressed it:

In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery
deck of an enemy's vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the
bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country,
saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against
them... I don't like Americans. I never did and never shall like
them. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with
or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole
truth,--_nor fight_ with them, were it not for the laurel to be
acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert,
and every way so worthy of one's steel as they have always proved.

Refitting in a French port, the dashing Blakely took the _Wasp_ to sea
again and encountered a convoy in charge of a huge, lumbering ship of
the line. Nothing daunted, the _Wasp_ flitted in among the timid
merchant ships and snatched a valuable prize laden with guns and
military stores. Attempting to bag another, she was chased away by the
indignant seventy-four and winged it in search of other quarry until she
sighted four strange sails. Three of them were British war brigs in hot
pursuit of a Yankee privateer, and Johnston Blakely was delighted to
play a hand in the game. He selected his opponent, which happened to be
the _Avon_, and overtook her in the darkness of evening. Before a strong
wind they foamed side by side, while the guns flashed crimson beneath
the shadowy gleam of tall canvas. Thus they ran for an hour and a half,
and then the _Avon_ signaled that she was beaten, with five guns
dismounted, forty-two men dead or wounded, seven feet of water in the
hold, the magazine flooded, and the spars and rigging almost destroyed.

Blakely was about to send a crew aboard when another hostile brig,
forsaking the agile Yankee privateer, came up to help the _Avon_.