As we look back at a distance of eighty-five years upon the battle it must seem to a candid student of naval matters that the excuses and the explanations were hardly worthy of the great peoples engaged in making them. Nevertheless, because it is the conventional thing, these details shall be given here:

The Constitution measured (Roosevelt’s account) 1,576 tons; the Guerrière, 1,338. The Constitution could fire 27 guns in a broadside, throwing 684 pounds of metal (actual weight); the Guerrière, 25 guns, throwing 556 pounds of metal. The Constitution carried 456 men; the Guerrière but 272. The Constitution lost, as already told, 7 killed and 7 wounded; while the Guerrière lost 23 killed and 56 wounded—over one-fourth of her crew. The comparative force of the ships rated by these standards, was as 100 to 70; the comparative casualties were as 18 to 100. To this may be added that the relative injury to the ships was as 100 to nothing.

Arguing from these figures the British writers say that the Constitution was “a seventy-four-gun ship of the line in disguise.” “Why should not any American feel proud of that assertion?” For if it be so, the old Quaker ship-builder of Philadelphia was not only the greatest ship-builder in America, but in the whole world. When the British officers called her so they confessed that when they had called her “a bunch of pine boards” they were mistaken. They confessed that they had been utterly incapable of judging the fighting worth of the Constitution, although they had gone over her and examined her carefully.

The British point to the fact that our most powerful projectiles came from twenty-four pounders, while theirs were from eighteens. Here again they confess their own inability to arm a ship. They had for twenty years been fighting the navies of Europe. Out of the experience there gained they had decided that the long eighteens were the best calibre for the main-deck battery of a frigate. The last frigates launched from British ship-yards previous to this battle were armed with long eighteens. The British officers who inspected the Constitution from time to time before the war of 1812 ridiculed the idea of trying to fight with long twenty-fours. The long twenty-fours were “too heavy!” But when their best frigates had been defeated by the Yankees they began to weigh the projectiles and learned that their defeat was due to the much ridiculed twenty-fours.

If the British had carried their investigations into the size of the shot a trifle further—to the mechanism of the guns, for instance—they would have learned something of real significance. They would have seen that the cannon of the Constitution were furnished with sights. The Guerrière lost her masts not by accident, but because the cool Yankee gunners could aim their weapons accurately.

But the most important—rather the most pleasing of all the confessions in the British explanations after defeat is that relating to the superior numbers of the American crews. The count showed 456 individuals on the Constitution, and 272 on the Guerrière. To contend, as the British writers do contend, that the “superiority on the American side “was” in number of men as—nine to five,” is to admit that man for man, an American naval seaman, in spite of his lack of experience, was the equal of the tar-stained, cicatrice-marked British seaman; and that was a confession which Americans in those days (not now) were most anxious to extort.

But the British writers did not stop at this confession. They went further and admitted all the most boastful Yankee could have wished. They said (vide the British Naval Chronicle), that “the few on board an American ship-of-war that are designated as boys are as old and stout as most men employed in our service.”

And the last of all is the confession of the same periodical that “had the Guerrière’s men been half as well skilled in the use of great guns as the Constitution’s were, the proportion of killed and wounded would not have been so great nor one ship made a complete wreck of while the other suffered no material injury in hull or rigging.”

Isaac did so maul and rake her

That the decks of Captain Dacre