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Updated: May 15, 2025
Numbers were pressing round the gallant band, and in another instant it seemed likely that they would have been overwhelmed. With such impetuosity, however, did Paul and his party dash on board, that although numbers of the Frenchmen were thronging the maindeck, they were rapidly driven back. In vain they struggled in vain they fought. Nothing could stop the fierce onslaught of the British seamen.
The enemy, for such he evidently was, now all at once yawed, and indulged us with a sight of his teeth; and there he was, fifteen ports of a side on his maindeck, with the due quantum of carronades on his quarterdeck and forecastle; whilst his short lower masts, white canvass, and the tremendous hoist in his topsails, showed him to be a heavy American frigate; and it was equally certain that he had cleverly hooked us under his lee, within comfortable range of his long twenty fours.
There she lay, with her clear black bends, and bright white streak, and long tier of cannon on the maindeck, and the carronades on the quarterdeck and forecastle grinning through the ports in the black bulwarks, while the white hammocks, carefully covered by the hammock-cloths, crowned the defences of the gallant frigate fore and aft, as she delved through the green surge one minute rolling and rising on the curling white crest of a mountainous sea, amidst a hissing snowstorm of spray, with her bright copper glancing from stem to stern, and her scanty white canvas swelling aloft, and twenty feet of her keel forward occasionally hove into the air and clean out of the water, as if she had been a sea-bird rushing to take wing and the next, sinking entirely out of sight hull, masts, and rigging behind an intervening sea, that rose in hoarse thunder between us, threatening to overwhelm both us and her.
The force of the Frolic consisted of sixteen thirty-two pound carronades, four twelve-pounders on the maindeck, and two twelve-pound carronades. Both vessels had more men than was essential to their efficiency; but while there was an equality of strength in the crews, there was an inequality in the number of guns and weight of metal the Frolic having four twelve-pounders more than the Wasp.
The greatest risk he ran was from over-kindness, or from having a tumble among the numerous candidates for the pleasure of dandling him when once they got him among them on the maindeck; and no set of schoolgirls could make a more eager rush to snatch up the little child left among them, than did the big-bearded, whiskered, and pig-tailed tars to catch hold of Billy True Blue.
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