96     LIGHT SQUADRONS AND SINGLE SHIPS     1812

men of straw, and by being permitted to enter a large proportion of landsmen a rating unknown on board an American ship of war ; still was the small remainder most difficult to be procured, even with all the latitude allowed in respect to age, size, and nautical experience. Sometimes when a captain, by dint of extraordinary exertions, had provided himself with a crew, such as a man of war's crew ought to be, the admiral on the station to which he belonged would pronounce the ship " too-well manned, " and order a proportion of her best men to be draughted on board the flag-ship at her moorings, to learn to be idle and worthless sending, in lieu of them, a parcel of jail-birds and raw hands, to make those among whom they were going nearly as bad as themselves.

There was another point in which the generality of British crews, as compared with any one American crew, were miserably deficient ; skill in the art of gunnery. While the American seamen were constantly firing at marks, the British seamen, except in particular cases, scarcely did so once in a year ; and some ships could be named, on board of which not a shot had been fired in this way for upwards of three years. Nor was the fault wholly the captain's : the instructions, under which he was bound to act, forbade him to use, during the first six months after the ship had received her armament, more shots per month than amounted to a third in number of her upper-deck guns ; and, after those six months had expired, he was to use only half the quantity. Considering by this, either that the lords of the admiralty discouraged firing at marks as a lavish expenditure of powder and shot, or that the limits they had thus set to the exercise of that branch of naval discipline destroyed its practical utility, many captains never put a shot in the guns until an enemy appeared : they employed the leisure time of the men in handling the sails, and in decorating the ship. Others, again, caring little about an order that placed their professional characters in jeopardy, exercised the crew repeatedly in firing at marks ; leaving the gunner to account, in the best manner he could, for the deficiency in his stores. As the generality of French crews were equally inexperienced with their British opponents, the unskilfulness of the latter in gunnery was not felt or remarked : we shall now have to adduce some instances, in quick succession, that will clearly show, how much the British navy at length suffered, by having relaxed in its attention to that most essential point in the business of war, the proper use of the weapons by which it was to be waged.

That our opinion on this subject is in perfect accordance with what was the opinion of a British officer of the first rank and distinction, will appear by the following quotation from the work of a contemporary : " The Earl of St: Vincent," says Captain Brenton, "in a letter to the author in 1813, thus expresses himself, ' I hear the exercise of the great gun is laid aside, and is

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