The resolutions were then agreed to.
Monday, January 18.
Two other members, to wit: from Massachusetts, Peleg Taliman; and from Pennsylvania, William Piper, appeared, and took their seats.
Encouragement to Privateer Captures.
The House resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole on the bill "relating to captures."
[The bill provides that compensation shall be allowed to the officers and crews of our public vessels, for vessels of the enemy necessarily destroyed at sea after their capture.]
Mr. Bassett stated to the House the considerations by which the Naval Committee had been induced to report this bill. It grew more immediately out of the case of the Guerriere destroyed by the Constitution—a case precisely in point. Such a principle as that which the bill proposed, he believed, had been engrafted in the British service. It was at least required by equity and sound policy, where the public service required the destruction of a vessel for fear of recapture by the enemy in its disabled state, that some compensation should be made to the captors in lieu of that which would have accrued from the sale of the vessel had it been brought into port.
Mr. H. Clay (Speaker) spoke in opposition both to the principles and details of the bill. He was disposed to believe the principle unprecedented in any other country; but even if it were not, he thought it ought not to exist in this country. It would have the effect to make it the interest of the captor, unless the vessel should be immediately on the coast, or in the very mouth of our rivers, to destroy the captured vessel. On consulting the underwriters, gentlemen would find the premium required on bringing in a vessel of any description from any considerable distance, would be equal to one-half her value; and, as proof of it, Mr. C. instanced the high insurance even from Charleston and New Orleans, along our own coast, to a northern port. The strongest possible temptation would, therefore, be offered by giving half the value of the destroyed vessel to the captors in case of her destruction. Mr. C. moved to strike out the first section of the bill.
Mr. Bassett replied to Mr. Clay, and defended the bill, on the ground of expediency and of precedent. In the British nation, he said, rewards were always liberally bestowed on skill and valor, and they must always be by every country that wishes to encourage these qualities in its citizens. The principle did exist in the British service, not by statutory, but by admiralty regulations; and in all such cases rewards had been liberally dispensed.
Mr. Bacon opposed the bill as inexpedient and unprecedented. To show that it went beyond the British legal provisions in that respect, he quoted a statute of that nation which allows to the captors of vessels so destroyed, as the bill contemplates, a bounty of five pounds for every man found alive on board said captured vessels, the aggregate to be equally distributed among the crew of the captors. Further, he believed, that Government had not gone.