pursued her route to the road of Madras, where she safely arrived ; and, as an additional proof of the discomfited state of the Psyché, the William-Petrie, whose cargo was valued at 40,000l sterling, although not wholly out of sight at the commencement of the action, also arrived in safety at Trincomalé.

Captain Lambert's gallantry was rewarded, as it well merited, by immediate promotion to post-rank ; and he was appointed to the command of the 12-pounder 32-gun frigate Terpsichore, one of the British cruisers upon the eastern station. In so creditable an action we are pleased in being able to state, that the two lieutenants of the Wilhelmina were George Tippet and George Phillimore, and her master Thomas Curtis.

From the details already given, it is evident that the character of this action mainly depends upon the actual, in contradistinction, to the nominal, force of the combatants. For instance, call the Wilhelmina a British 12-pounder 32-gun frigate, or a frigate " of 32 guns, " and you arm her, according to the admiralty-order fixing her establishment, with 38 guns, including six 24-pounder carronades, and with a crew of 215 men and boys. Call the Psyché even " a large, " or a " frigate-built " privateer, and you will scarcely raise her, in the reader's estimation, above the Bellone, beaten off by the Milbrook, or the Blonde that captured the Wolverine. Even suppose the reader to rank the " large French frigate-built privateer " with the Egyptienne, beaten off by the Osprey, and afterwards captured by the Hippomenes, you have already made the implied full-armed Wilhelmina more than a match for her, and have therefore reduced the exploit of a British frigate far beneath that confessedly performed by a British sloop. Omit the name of the privateer, lengthen the duration of the action, and mistate the mode of its termination and you convert that which, if not a conquest, was decidedly a victory, into a censurable defeat. It is with us an invariable rule not to state, without showing, that an action is gallant, or officer a " hero. " Above all things, we avoid making such assertion when our own details, few as they may be, prove directly the reverse. These remarks premised, we subjoin the account of the Wilhelmina's action, as it stands in the work of a contemporary.

" Captain Henry Lambert commanded the Wilhelmina, of thirty-two guns, an old Dutch-built frigate, without one quality to recommend her as a ship of war, unless it were that of looking so unlike one in every respect that the enemy fearlessly approached her, and by that means were sometimes captured when a chase would have ended in disappointment. This ship, in the month of April, 1804, fell in, off the east side of Ceylon, with a large French frigate-built privateer, which she engaged with great obstinacy and fury for three hours, when the Frenchman being much disabled, and the British frigate still more so, they separated, nor was it in the power of our young hero to renew

^ back to top ^