For to fight and to conquer is a seaman's free right.
The poet naturally takes the privilege of presenting the confounded Britisher in the most humiliating light, and the manner in which Captain Dacres signified his surrender is probably more graphic than historically correct:—
Then Dacres looked wild, and then sheathed his sword,
When he found that his masts had all gone by the board.
And, dropping astern, cries out to his steward,
"Come up and be d——d! Fire a gun to leeward!"
This battle, fought in the North Atlantic on August 2, 1812, between the American frigate Constitution, Captain Isaac Hull, and the British frigate Guerriere, Captain James R. Dacres, and one of consummate seamanship as well as fighting capacity on the part of Hull, was the theme of the best and most spirited song of the whole war; one which still keeps its place in the forecastle, and, it may be hoped, will keep it so long as Uncle Sam has a war-ship afloat. It is set to a very lively and emphatic air, called, indifferently, The Landlady of France and The Bandy-Legged Officer, from the coarsely comical words which George Colman the younger had written to it.