1814	Light Squadrons and Single Ships	276

From the time of her action, except to land them when docked to have her damages repaired, the Eurotas retained these same guns, until Captain James Lillicrap paid the ship off on the 6th of January, 1816 ; when the Eurotas landed her " 28 Congreve's 24-pounders " at the arsenal at Woolwich. Consequently, there could have been no well-grounded complaint against the guns, otherwise the board of admiralty would not have suffered the Eurotas again to go to sea with them on board. On the contrary, the lords of the admiralty were so pleased with the report made of the 40 cwt. Congreve 24-pounder, after a series of experiments tried at Sutton Heath, that, in the latter end of the year 1813, they ordered 300 more of the same description of gun to be cast ; and, as a proof that the behaviour of the guns in the action of the Eurotas with the Clorinde, rather confirmed than lessened the previous good opinion entertained of them, the board of admiralty, on the 28th of April, 1815, ordered that all the first-rate ships in the British navy should thenceforward be established, upon their upper or third decks, with the Congreve 24-pounder.

After this full exposition of the perfect adequacy of the Eurotas's 24-pounders to perform, in a close contest especially, quite as well as any guns of the same caliber, we might answer the second objection, by simply pointing to the execution done by English 24 and 32, against French 18 and 24 pounders, and vice versa, as unfolded in our detailed account of this action ; but we shall not blink the question : we stated, that the ship's company of the Eurotas had not been sufficiently practised at the guns, and we are prepared to prove our assertion. We must premise that, at the time the Eurotas was commissioned and armed with 24-pounders, three American 24-pounder frigates had recently captured three English 18-pounder frigates, and that with such impunity as to indicate, that the art of gunnery had been much neglected in the British navy. The degree of attention paid by a captain to the exercise of his men, which would be commendable in 1811, would scarcely deserve any praise at all in 1813. And even in the latter part of 1813, a captain of a 38-gun frigate, armed in the usual manner of her class, might allege, as some excuse for not troubling himself more than he had been accustomed to do about the expertness of his crew at the guns, that the board of admiralty had issued an order, that no British 18-pounder frigate was voluntarily to engage one of the 24-pounder frigates of America. But here was a frigate, fitted out purposely to be a match for one of those frigates ; and we have not a doubt that, before he fell in with the Clorinde, Captain Phillimore expressed a strong desire to encounter the Constitution. Under these circumstances, no pains should have been spared to make the crew of the Eurotas expert cannoneers. We have seen the means that Captain Broke took

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