216     LIGHT SQUADRONS AND SINGLE SHIPS     1813

four or five days in a good position for intercepting the trade passing in and out of the Irish Channel, a rumour of " superior force in that vicinity, " another " line-of-battle ship and frigate " probably, rendered it expedient for the commodore to shift his cruising ground. He then made the circuit of Ireland ; and, getting into the latitude of Cape Clear, steered for the banks of Newfoundland. Here Commodore Rodgers was near being gratified with the sight of a real line-of-battle ship and frigate, the Bellerophon 74, Captain Edward Hawker, bearing the flag of Vice-admiral Sir Richard Goodwin Keats, and the Hyperion 36, Captain William Pryce Cumby.

With this intelligence, the President bent her course towards the United States ; and on the 23d of September, when a little to the southward of Nantucket, succeeded in decoying and capturing the British 5-gun schooner Highflyer, tender to the San-Domingo 74, and commanded by her second lieutenant, William Hutchinson. That was not all. Owing to a great deal of cunning on one side, and a tolerable share of imbecility on the other, Commodore Rodgers obtained the stations of the different British men of war on the American coast ; and taking his measures accordingly, was enabled, on the same day, to enter unobserved the harbour of Newport, Rhode-island.

The Congress frigate continued cruising, without effecting any thing of consequence, until the middle of December; when Captain Smith succeeded in reaching, unobserved as it also appears, the harbour of Portsmouth, New-Hampshire. One of her officers, when writing to a friend announcing his return says

" The Congress has 410 of her crew on board, all in good health : she lost four men by sickness, and has manned a prize with a few others. " The officer's friend carried this letter to a newspaper editor, and he gave it immediate insertion. There cannot therefore be a doubt, that the Congress had quitted port with at least 425 men ; and the Congress and Chesapeake were of the same class. Some months after the arrival of the Congress at Portsmouth, the Tenedos cruised off the port ; and, during a long blockade, Captain Parker used every means in his power to induce the Congress to come out and engage him. But the fate of the Chesapeake had put a stop to the future cruises of the American 18-pounder frigates, and the Congress, after a while, was disarmed and laid up.

On the 5th of August, off the southern coast of the United States, the British schooner Dominica, of 12 carronades, 12-pounders, and two sixes, with, as an extra gun, a 32-pounder carronade upon a traversing carriage, Lieutenant George Wilmot Barrette, having under her convoy the king's packet Princess-Charlotte, bound from St.-Thomas's to England, fell in with the French, or rather, the Franco-American, privateer-schooner Decatur, of six 12-pounder carronades and one long 18-pounder traversing carriage, commanded by the celebrated Captain

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