Which made him cry peccavi, O!
But hours two, the Java new,
Maintained the battle bravely, O!
[Spoken.]
But our gallant tars, as soon as they were piped to quarters, gave three cheers, and boldly swore, by the blood of the heroes of Tripoli, that, sooner than strike, they’d go to the bottom, singing:
[Sung.]
Tid re I, Tid re I, Tid re id re I do.
The Congress of the United States had on June 18, 1812, enacted “That war be, and the same is hereby declared to exist between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America and their territories.” The incapable administration of President Madison had decided to make the war on land and keep the few ships of the navy in port. The indomitable officers of the navy, led by Bainbridge, had modified this determination, but only after long argument, so that the ships were permitted to go out to battle. Hull, magnificent in his courage, had even sailed without orders, even while orders to keep him in port were on the way. And the result of it all was this:
In six months those few long-derided Yankee frigates had done more than all the navies of Europe combined together had been able to do in twenty years. They had, in single-ship actions, captured five English men-o’-war, destroying at least three of them beyond repair, inflicting losses that varied from one-third to four-fifths of the beaten crews, and the longest action, from the first to the last gun, was less than two hours. A tremendous loss—a loss such as no English ships had inflicted on an enemy in any single-ship battle, and the extreme brevity of each contest, were the astounding features of these actions. Not in all the twenty years of steady sea-fighting between the years of 1792 and 1812 had the British navy suffered five such defeats as those inflicted upon her by the Yankees during the six months that ended when the mountainous bluffs of Brazil echoed to the explosion of the beaten Java.
