In 1816 Captain Perry was sent against the Algerian pirates who were again troublesome. The ruler finally signed a treaty of peace and Perry returned without having had to fight. Two years later, in 1819, he was ordered to Venezuela to protest against seizures of American vessels and to present claims for losses. He succeeded in his mission, but he did not live to return home, dying of yellow fever on his thirty-fourth birthday, August 23, 1819. His body was brought home in a war-vessel and buried with military honors at Newport, Rhode Island. Another hero of the war of 1812 was Thomas Macdonough, “the hero of Lake Champlain,” who won a decisive victory against odds of men, guns, and ships. Thomas Macdonough was born in Delaware and entered the navy when he was sixteen. In 1803 he sailed on the frigate Philadelphia bound for Tripoli. At Gibraltar he was left in charge of a captured Moorish ship. The Philadelphia, as you know, was taken by the Tripolitans; its crew was kept in close confinement nearly two years. Macdonough served on board the Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, and he was one of the seventy men who captured and destroyed the Philadelphia, which Admiral Nelson declared to be “the most bold and daring act of the age.” For his gallantry on this occasion, Macdonough was made lieutenant. In 1810 he made a voyage in the merchant-service; at Liverpool he was impressed and carried on board a British vessel, but he managed to make his escape in the clothes of an English officer. In 1812 Lieutenant Macdonough, then twenty-six years old, was put in command of the naval force on Lake Champlain. You remember the old plan of the British under Burgoyne for the invasion of New York. A similar plan was now devised by the British and eleven thousand soldiers were collected at the end of Lake Champlain to invade New York by way of the lake. The English had built a fleet to convey this army. The Americans had at the time, in 1814, only a force of about two thousand men at Plattsburg, New York, and on the lake Lieutenant Macdonough’s fleet of fourteen vessels, with eighty-six guns and eight hundred and eighty-two men. This fleet protected Plattsburg and it was necessary to destroy it before General Prevost, the British commander, could make the land attack. The British fleet, consisting of sixteen vessels with ninety-two guns and nine hundred and thirty-seven men, advanced to the attack early on the morning of September 11, 1814. Macdonough in Plattsburg Bay awaiting the enemy. The shot of the British vessel shattered a hen-coop on board Macdonough’s vessel; a game cock, thus suddenly released, jumped on a gun, flapped his wings, and crowed. “The men laughed and cheered; and immediately afterwards Macdonough himself fired the first shot from one of the long guns.”