Medal Awarded to Johnston Blakeley after the Capture of the Reindeer by the Wasp.
On the other hand, the Yankees had not “long served together.” Most of them were landsmen who were seasick for a week on leaving port. And yet because of native ability they had been easily trained; they stood in silence under fire for five shots, and in this, their first battle, they aimed their guns so accurately that “the hull of the Reindeer was literally cut to pieces and her masts were in a tottering state.” This quotation is from Allen. The fact is that she was so badly cut to pieces in the wake of her gun-ports that it was impossible to tell how many Yankee shots did strike her hull. A breeze that sprang up the next day at once toppled the foremast overboard, and, in short, she was so badly injured that she could not be carried into either of the nearby French ports, and she was accordingly fired and blown to pieces. The British lost in killed and mortally wounded thirty-three, and in wounded thirty-four, “nearly all severely.”
The Wasp measured 509 tons to the Reindeer 477. She fired eleven guns, throwing 315 pounds of metal to a broadside, where the Reindeer fired ten guns throwing 210 pounds of metal to a broadside. The Wasp had a crew of 173, mostly landsmen, who had been together less than two months; the Reindeer had 118 who were “the pride of Plymouth.”
While nothing that is written here can add to the fame of Captain Manners, of the Reindeer, it may be said that Anglo-Saxon republicans are proud of his skill, and are thrilled by the story of his magnificent gallantry just as the Anglo-Saxon nominal-monarchists are.
Having destroyed the Reindeer, Blakeley sailed with the Wasp to L’Orient, France, the port where of old the Yankee cruisers had refitted after cruising against British commerce in the English Channel. En route, three days after the battle, a number of the wounded prisoners were put on a Portuguese brig, called the Lisbon Packet, and sent to Plymouth.
The Wasp was detained at L’Orient until August 27th, refitting, and then she got away to continue her work on the high seas. It was her luck to fall in with another British brig-sloop, within four days—a sloop like the Reindeer—and few, if any, more instructive pages of history can be found than those that compare the two actions which the Wasp had with these vessels of the class she was designed to destroy with ease.
The second brig-sloop to meet her fate under the guns of the Wasp was the Avon, “commander the Honourable James Arbuthnot,” and the battle was fought on September 1, 1814.
That was a most interesting day in the lives of the Wasp’s crew. To begin the day they fell in with a fleet of ten merchantmen, guarded by the big seventy-four-gun British liner Armada and a bomb ship. The liner was an average ship of her class, but the lively Wasp dashed boldly into the fleet and cut out the brig Mary loaded with cannon captured from the Spaniards and other military stores.
Having effectually fired the Mary, the Wasp tried for another, but the Armada chased her away this time and she went hunting other game, and found it.
The covey included a fleet of four vessels, of which, as the event showed, three were British brig-sloops of the class of the beaten Reindeer, and a merchantman that had been recaptured from a Yankee privateer. The vessels were rather widely separated, one of them, the Castilian by name, having gone in chase of the privateer. What another of the brig sloops, the Tartarus, was doing is not told in any printed account, while the third, which was the Avon, Captain Arbuthnot, had started with the Castilian in chase of the Yankee privateer, but had not been fast enough to keep up with the procession. So it happened that she was right in the way as the Wasp came along in the first shades of night.