The crew of the Richard had been reduced to about three hundred officers and men, as near as can be ascertained. The desertion of the barge, the loss of the boat under Cutting Lunt off the Irish coast, the various details by which the several prizes had been manned, and the absence of the boat sent that morning under the charge of Henry Lunt, which had not, and did not come back until after the action, had reduced the original number to these figures. A most serious feature of the situation was the lack of capable sea officers. There were so few of the latter on board the Richard originally that the absence of the two mentioned seriously hampered her work. Dale himself was a host. Those that remained, who, with the exception of the purser, sailing master, and the officers of the French contingent, were young and inexperienced, mostly midshipmen--boys, in fact--made up for their deficiencies by their zeal and courage. The officers of the French contingent proved themselves to be men of a high class, who could be depended upon in desperate emergencies. The Serapis was a brand-new, double-banked frigate, of about eight hundred tons burden--that is, she carried guns on two covered and one uncovered decks. This was an unusual arrangement, not subsequently considered advantageous or desirable, but it certainly enabled her to present a formidable battery within a rather short length; her shortness, it was believed, would greatly enhance her handiness and mobility, qualities highly desirable in a war vessel, especially in the narrow seas. On the lower or main deck twenty 18-pounders were mounted; on the gun deck proper, twenty 9-pounders; and on the spar deck, ten 6-pounders, making a total of fifty guns, twenty-five in broadside, throwing three hundred pounds' weight of shot at each discharge as against the Richard's one hundred and seventy-four. She was manned by about three hundred trained and disciplined English seamen, forming a homogeneous, efficient crew, and well they proved their quality. Richard Pearson, her captain, was a brave, competent, and successful officer, who had enjoyed a distinguished career, winning his rank by gallant and daring enterprises; no ordinary man, indeed, but one from whom much was to be expected. In making this comparison between the two ships it must not be forgotten that while the difference in the number of guns--ten--was not great, yet in their caliber and the consequent weight of broadside the Richard was completely outclassed. Then, too, the penetrative power of an 18-pound gun is vastly greater than that of a 12-pound gun, a thing well understood by naval men, though scarcely appearing of much moment on paper. Indeed, it was a maxim that a 12-pound frigate could not successfully engage an 18-pounder, or an 18-pound frigate cope with a 24-pound ship.[12]