1812	Light Squadrons and Single Ships	88

obtained from his prize the name of the convoying frigate, whose protection was of so much use to her, and by the first opportunity wrote home an account of his exploit; concluding with the, as applied to a British ship, most galling words: " We endeavoured to bring the frigate to action, but did not succeed. " This letter appeared in several English, as well as American newspapers ; but we can find no explanation of the circumstance out of which it originated. Had Captain Porter really " endeavoured " to bring the Minerva to action, we do not see what could have prevented the Essex, with her decided superiority of sailing, from getting alongside of her. But no such thought, we are sure, entered the head of Captain Porter. This will be clear to all, as we proceed in our analysis of that gentleman's claim, or claims rather, for they are numerous, to wear the laurel.

On the 13th of August, but in what spot off the American coast nowhere appears, the Essex fell in with the British 16-gun ship-sloop Alert, Captain Thomas Lamb Poulden Laugharne. The ship, thus raised to the dignity of a sloop of war, had, eight years before, carried coals from Newcastle to London. In the year 1804 twelve of these craft were purchased for men of war ; and the Oxford collier became the Alert sloop, fitted with 18-pounder carronades, the highest caliber she would bear. Had she been a little smaller, and rigged with two masts instead of three, the Alert would have been a gun-brig ; but her unfortunate mizenmasts exalted her above scores of vessels, any one of whom, among the two classes next below her in our abstracts, except perhaps the Alacrity, would have gloried in having such a ship to contend with : nay, some of the Alacrity's fine class would not have declined a combat with two such opponents. By the end of the year of 1811, ten of these choice men of war had either been broken up, or converted to peaceable harbour ships. But there were two that yet remained ; and, as if it was supposed that they in reality possessed the qualities of which their names were significant, the Avenger and Alert sailed for the station of North America, the very month before the United States declared war against Great Britain.

When the American frigate Essex, as we have stated, fell in with the Alert, the latter was in search of the Hornet ; such another sloop of war as the Little-Belt or Bonne-Citoyenne, and who of course would, or at least ought to, have captured both the Alert and Avenger, had she encountered them together. Either mistaking the Essex for what she was not, or aiming at a still higher flight than the Hornet, the Alert bore down upon the former's weather quarter, and opened her puny fire. In a quarter of an hour, the ci-devant collier had seven feet water in her hold, three of her men wounded, and her colours down, and had neither hurt a man, nor done any other injury, on board the Essex.

The conspicuous gallantry of Captain Laugharne entitled him

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