“Wot a pity,” growled Danny Dixon, the quartermaster, to his mates, “that somebody hadn’t ’a’ axerdentally—jist axerdentally, you know—pulled a lockstring and fired one o’ them starboard guns! The Britishers ain’t the sort to refuse a fight; they would ’a’ fired back cocksure, and we could ’a’ had a friendly tussle and found out which were the best ship, and then it could ’a’ been fixed up arterwards—’cause ’twould ’a’ been all a axerdent, you know.”
This was agreed with by all of Danny’s messmates, as they left their stations and gathered forward. The two ships were now abreast of each other, and the distance between them was being quickly decreased by Commodore Barry’s orders, who himself took the deck. They were not more than two cables’ lengths apart. The English frigate, which had taken in considerable of her canvas, now took in her royals. The American ship followed suit, so that in a little while both ships had come down to a five-knot gait, although there was a good breeze blowing. They were near enough to hear conversation and laughter on the English ship, and the men gathered on the fok’sl of the Thetis called out loudly to each other, as if to emphasize the rudeness of not returning the hails of the American ship. In the midst of a perfect silence on the United States, which was soon followed on the Thetis, Danny Dixon, who had a stentorian voice, swung himself in the forechains and began to sing as loud as he could bawl:
“Boney is a great man,
A soldier brave and true,
But the British they can lick him,
On land and water, too!”
This produced a roaring cheer from the British. The Americans, who knew what was coming next, waited, grinning broadly until the laugh should be on their side. The men gathered on the Thetis’s port side, and the officers hung over the rail to catch the next verse. As soon as the cheering was over, Danny fairly shouted, in a voice that could be heard a mile:
“But greater still, and braver far,
And tougher than shoe leather,
Was Washington, the man wot could