Says the Duke, who commanded but failed to restrain them, regarding their deeds in a friendly country:
“It is impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops. There is not an outrage of any description that has not been committed on a people who have uniformly received them as friends.”
And Napier describes as follows the sacking of Badajos by these veterans:
“All the dreadful passions of human nature were displayed. Shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder, shrieks and piteous lamentations, groans, shouts, imprecations, the hissing of fires bursting from the houses, the crashing of doors and windows, and reports of muskets used in violence resounded for two days and nights in the streets of Badajos.”
These veterans, who “shamed the most ferocious barbarians of antiquity,” (Napier), were sent across the Atlantic to subjugate a people fighting for freedom from equally brutal press gangs. Some of them were sent to the South that they might take New Orleans and so add the whole watershed of the Mississippi to the British domains, and the number sent on that invasion seemed overwhelming. Washington had been taken meantime, and the public buildings, including the national library, burned. The region of the Chesapeake was overrun. The whole Atlantic coast was blockaded by the tremendous fleets that the British were able to send at the end of the European war. And then came other hosts of “Wellington’s Invincibles” to the Sorel River, bound, through the northern gateway, to the head-waters of the Hudson, that they might cut off New England from the middle and southern States.
As the reader will remember, the Americans had two small sloops (one-masted vessels) on Lake Champlain during 1813—the Growler and the Eagle, each mounting eleven guns. These were sent by Lieutenant Thomas Macdonough in chase of three British gun-boats, and so eager were the Yankee crews that the sloops followed the British into the outlet of the lake and so far toward the St. Lawrence as to arrive in sight of Isle-aux-Noix, where the British had a fort and where three more British gun-boats were lying. It was now the turn of the British to force the fighting, and they gathered in great numbers on both shores of the river, while the gun-boats, that had, as usual, a long gun each, turned and opened fire at long range. The indiscreet zeal of Lieutenant Sydney Smith, who commanded the American sloops, was fatal, for both were captured.
To repair the loss thus sustained Macdonough seized a merchant sloop called the Rising Sun (built at Essex, in 1810, for E. A. Boynton), and converted her into a war-vessel by mounting seven long nine-pounders on her deck. She was renamed the Preble. But he was unable to secure a sufficient sea-power to prevent an invasion by a British force that reached the Saranac River a little later, though he undoubtedly hastened the retiring of that force and prevented any further invasions during 1813.
Then as fall came on he repaired to the village of Vergennes, on the Otter Creek (seven miles up from the lake) in Vermont. Vergennes had a brisk community in those days. There were an iron foundry and a rolling-mill and a wire factory there, besides saw-mills and a lot of other industries, the whole dependent on the water-power found in the falls of the creek. Macdonough found there just the workmen needed, and to insure the control of this gateway to the American Union during the next season, he laid, early in the spring, the keel of a full-rigged ship—a corvette—to which he gave the significant name of Saratoga. The forests furnished timber in abundance, the rolling-mills made the bar iron for fastenings, and the foundry turned out no less than one hundred and seventy-seven tons of shot for the great guns.
Then a vessel that had been built as a merchant steamer was taken for the use of the Government, and because her machinery got out of order at every trip it was removed and she was rigged as a schooner under the name of Ticonderoga.
With the melting of the ice, came the news that the British intended to come to the Otter and destroy the new ships. A fort that mounted seven twelve-pounders on naval carriages had been erected to command the mouth of Otter Creek, and Macdonough sent a party of seamen to reinforce the militia that manned this battery. It was on May 14, 1814, that the British appeared. There were eight gun-boats, each with a long gun (presumably eighteen and twenty-four pounders) and a bomb-sloop with a big mortar on her deck. The battery on shore opened fire as soon as the enemy came within range, and the enemy replied for an hour, when they gave it up and retired.