The havoc in both crews had been frightful for so short a battle. On the _Shannon_, twenty-four were killed and fifty-eight wounded; on the _Chesapeake_ forty-seven were killed and ninety-eight wounded. Nearly one third of all the men engaged in the action had been struck. Captain Lawrence died in four days. His age was but thirty-one. He had been greatly admired for his personal bravery, his courteousness, his regard for the sailors under his command, and his wonderful nautical skill. {200}In explanation of this defeat, it is said that Captain Broke had been for weeks giving his men a special training for such an encounter; while the _Chesapeake_ had a heterogeneous crew, a part of them were new men, and many of the old ones were in a state of half mutiny from not having received prize money that was due them. Some of the officers were sick on shore, others were inexperienced, and several of the sailors were seen drunk in the streets of Boston an hour before they were summoned to go on board as the vessel was weighing anchor. These facts seem to be well established; but the explanation does not make it any the less a British victory. If Broke's men were under good discipline, while Lawrence's were not, he is entitled to as much credit for his achievement as if it had been accomplished through superior courage or any other means. And Lawrence, had he not died, might properly have been censured, or even punished, for going out to fight under such circumstances, when he could have waited till he had trained his crew. It was also said that the sailors entertained a superstitious belief that the _Chesapeake_ was an unlucky ship. It was she that had been fired into by the _Leopard_, in 1807, when she had not a single gun in condition to return the shot; and just before her battle with the {201}_Shannon_ she had cruised across the Atlantic to the coast of Africa, and home again by way of the West Indies, without taking a single prize. Broke's victory was a grateful salve to England's pride, so sorely wounded by the naval events of 1812, and her historians have never tired of dwelling upon it. One of the latest of them devotes more than eight pages to it alone, while he disposes of all the other sea-fights of this war in less than three. The American brig _Argus_, of twenty guns, commanded by Captain William Henry Allen, after taking Hon. William H. Crawford to France as the new United States Minister at the French court, made a cruise in the English and Irish channels, where she captured twenty merchantmen. But in the evening of August 13th she had the misfortune to capture a vessel loaded with wine. The crew spent most of the night in transferring the cargo, and helped themselves liberally to the contents of some of the casks. Just before daylight, when all of them were tired out and many were intoxicated, they completed their misfortune by setting fire to the prize.