1811     LITTLE-BELT AND PRESIDENT     7

Indefatigable, and Endymion), that carried long 24-pounders. Upon a certain occasion, which will soon pass in order of detail, the Americans loudly proclaimed, that the Chesapeake was the very worst frigate they possessed. The Chesapeake was a 36-gun frigate, and, as we have elsewhere shown, had the ports for mounting on her two broadsides 54 guns. * For a short time, we believe, the ship did mount that number of guns, with a crew of about 440 men. Besides the Constellation and Chesapeake, built in 1797, there were the Congress and New-York, built in 1799. Had the Americans possessed no stronger frigates than the heaviest of these, Europeans would not have been so surfeited with tales of American naval prowess.

On the 10th of May, 1811, the United States' 44-gun frigate President, Captain Charles Ludlow, bearing the broad pendant of Commodore John Rodgers, with sails unbent, and the principal part of her officers on shore, lay moored off Annapolis in the Chesapeake; when, at 3 p.m., the commodore came unexpectedly on board, and immediately all hands went to work bending sails and getting the ship ready for sea. The surgeon, too, began preparing his plasters and splinters, and rubbing up his instruments of amputation; rather an extraordinary occupation on board a neutral frigate. All this bustle and preparation was not, however, without an object. On the 1st of the month, in the forenoon, the British 38-gun frigate Guerrière, Captain Samuel John Pechell, cruising off Sandy-Hook, boarded the American brig Spitfire, from Portland bound to New-York, and impressed out of her a man named John Deguyo, a passenger and a native citizen of the United States. The Guerrière had also impressed, or did shortly afterwards impress, from vessels that she boarded off the coast, two other native American citizens, Gideon Caprian and Joshua Leeds. That John Deguyo was a native American, or, at all events, that he was not a British subject, is clear from the circumstance, that on the 12th of June the Guerrière discharged him into the British 18-gun ship-sloop Gorée, Captain Henry Dilkes Byng; and, on the 30th, the latter put him on board an American ship for a passage to the United States. Caprian was also discharged, but not Leeds, because he had entered.

The Spitfire arrived at New-York on the same day, or the day after, Deguyo had been pressed out of her ; and the occurrence, within five or six days at the furthest, must have been known at Washington. The written orders to Commodore Rodgers were probably, as Mr. Secretary Munroe asserts, " to protect the coast and commerce of the United States ; " but the officers who arrived from Washington on the 11h of May, to join their ship, must have brought some verbal orders of a more particular nature ; for one of the President's officers, in a letter to a friend

* See p. 332

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