My experience in this affair calls to mind that of the privateer Saratoga, Captain Riker. She carried eighteen guns and a crew of one hundred and forty men. In the autumn of 1812 she captured the ship Quebec, sixteen guns, from Jamaica, with a cargo worth three hundred thousand dollars. She went into the port of La Guayra, Venezuela, but was warned off, as some British ships were cruising in the neighborhood, and the authorities did not want any battle in the harbor. A fog came on, and as she was going out of the bay she captured a British vessel worth twenty thousand dollars.
The fog lasted all day and into the next; and just as it cleared off she fell in with a twelve-gun brig, that she captured. Then she ran into the jaws of two British men-of-war. They supposed she would steer so as to avoid both of them at the same time, and under that supposition they separated. The Saratoga watched her chance, suddenly going about, and steering straight between them. They could not turn as quickly as she could, and before they went about she was practically out of danger; the shot flew thick about her, but did no serious damage.
In June of that year (1814) I sailed on what I intended should be my last cruise; and it proved to be the last, though it ended quite differently from what I had planned. Robert Burns tells us in his ode "To a Mouse," that
""The best laid schemes o' mice and men,
Gang aft a-gley."
And so it was with my last cruise in the Marguerite, in what proved to be the closing year of the war.
The privateers had committed so much havoc among British merchantmen, that few vessels ventured on the ocean without convoy. Occasionally a privateer would succeed in cutting out one of the convoyed craft, but the chance did not come often enough to make the business encouraging. Sometimes it happened that a ship-of-war was disguised as a merchantman; and when a privateer drew up alongside in full confidence of having taken a rich prize, ports opened in the side of the apparently peaceful craft, guns were run out, and the privateer was quickly brought to grief by twice or three times the weight of her metal; or if she managed to escape, it was only after severe suffering.
On this cruise I sailed away to the eastward, avoiding the big men-of-war and the convoys, in the hope of falling upon an unprotected merchant-ship.
Nothing was seen that appeared judicious for the Marguerite to attack, until we were more than half-way across the Atlantic. One afternoon we made out a sail to the eastward, and I cracked on in her direction in order to get near enough to make her out, and decide whether to close or give her a wide berth. We overhauled her rapidly, and while the sun was yet well in the sky. I was satisfied that, though much larger than the Marguerite, she was not sufficiently strong to cope with us successfully. So I kept on while she was trying to escape us, and in due time I fired a gun as a signal for her to heave-to.
She paid no attention to it; and then I fired another gun, following it by a third, which sent a ball through her mainsail. Upon this she took the hint, and hauled aback to wait for us to come up.