18th, which was as early as the breeze would permit, the Cyane, tender, and boats stood across to Trois-Rivières. On arriving at the anchorage, the Garland ran the Eclair on board, and lieutenants Mackenzie and Peachey, with 30 men, boarded and carried the French schooner in the face of the batteries.

This gallant exploit was not performed wholly without loss, the British having had one seaman and one marine killed, and a sergeant of marines and two seamen wounded. In defending herself, which she appears to have done in a very manful way, the Eclair lost one seaman killed, two drowned, and her captain, first and second lieutenants, and six men wounded. The schooner had recently sailed from Rochefort ; and, although mounting only four guns, was pierced for, and, being 145 tons, was well able to carry, 12 guns, the number she afterwards mounted in the British service.

Late in the month of December, 1800, the British 8-gun schooner Active, Acting-lieutenant Michael Fitton, having returned to Port-Royal from a long cruise, needed a thorough repair. To employ to advantage the intervening time, Captain Henry Vansittart, of the Abergavenny 54, of which ship the Active was the tender, allowed Lieutenant Fitton to transfer himself and crew to one of the Active's prizes, the late Spanish privateer N.-S. de los Dolores ; a felucca of about 50 tons, mounting one long 12-pounder on a traversing carriage, with a screw to raise it from the hold when wanted for use. Having embarked on board of her, and stowed as well as he could his 44 officers and men, Lieutenant Fitton, early in January, 1801, sailed out on a cruise upon the Spanish Main.

In her way along the coast, for every part of which her commander was a pilot, the tender, whose rig and appearance were an admirable decoy, destroyed two or three enemy's small craft ; such as, although not worth sending in, were precisely the kind of vessels which had recently been committing such serious depredations on West India commerce. It may be observed here, that small, swift-sailing, armed vessels, properly commanded and appointed, are the only description of cruisers which can operate with effect against the hordes of tiny, but well-manned, and, to a merchant vessel, formidable privateers, that usually swarm in the West India seas. The Active herself had perhaps captured or destroyed more of these marauders than any frigate upon the station; and it need not be urged at what a comparatively trifling expense.

A succession of stormy weather, and the leaky state of the felucca's deck, by which chiefly 22 of the men had been made sick, induced her commander to steer for, and take possession of a small key near Point Canoe on the Spanish Main. Here Lieutenant Fitton erected a tent, landed his men and stores, and, after making the best disposition his means would admit to resist an attack, examined the state of his vessel. The main

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