Thy noble daring, though with adverse fate,
The rich historic page shall long relate,
And the glad voice of freemen’s loud acclaim
Teach lisping infancy thy honored name.
Captain Porter aided in the defence of Baltimore after his return home. After the war he served as a commissioner on naval affairs, and in 1826 resigned his commission. He was afterward American Minister to Turkey, and died at Constantinople in 1843. His body was brought to America and was eventually buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Philadelphia.
CHAPTER III
TALES OF THE YANKEE CORVETTES
A LITTLE LOP-SIDED FRIGATE REBUILT INTO A SUPERIOR SLOOP-OF-WAR—OVERLAND (ALMOST) TO ESCAPE THE BLOCKADE—HER LUCK AS A CRUISER—A MARVELLOUS RACE WITH A BRITISH FRIGATE OVER A COURSE FOUR HUNDRED MILES LONG—SAVED BY A SQUALL—CORNERED IN THE PENOBSCOT—THE GALLANT FIGHT OF THE YANKEE CREW AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS—BUILDING A NEW NAVY—THE SHORT-LIVED PORTSMOUTH CORVETTE FROLIC—ONE BROADSIDE WAS ENOUGH—CAPTURED BY THE ENEMY—SWIFT AND DEADLY WORK OF THE CREW OF THE YANKEE PEACOCK WHEN THEY MET THE EPERVIER—DISTINCTLY A LUCKY SHIP—FATE OF THE SIREN AFTER THE COFFIN FLOATED.
Of the seventeen war-ships, big and little, that were named on the register of the American Navy when war was declared in 1812, the Adams, rated as a twenty-eight-gun frigate, lay at Washington. It had been determined to alter this ship into what was known as a corvette. Readers not trained to a life at sea not infrequently find themselves puzzled by the terms applied to the old style war-ships, and no term is quite so annoying as that of corvette, for the reason that it is used interchangeably with sloop-of-war. The dictionaries do not help one very much. In a “Vocabulaire des Termes de Marine” printed in 1783, a corvette is said to be “a general name for sloops-of-war and all vessels under twenty guns,” but it is manifest, from a consideration of the size and force of the Adams and other American vessels called corvettes, that American officers applied the name only to the largest ships that had one deck of guns only, with neither a poop nor a forecastle.
United States Razee* Independence at Anchor.