Ten years later Sir Thomas Allen was sent during the summer with a squadron once more to repress Algerine piracy. He arrived before Algiers, and was so successful that he compelled the release of all the English captives which had been accumulating there. Indeed, it is amazing to count up so many of these expeditions from England alone. Thus, in the early spring of 1671, we find Sir Edward Spragge sent out to the Mediterranean for the same purpose. The following account is condensed from his own dispatch and is of no ordinary interest. On the 20th of April, Spragge was cruising in his flagship the _Revenge_, about fifteen or twenty miles off Algiers, when he met his other ships, the _Mary_, _Hampshire_, _Portsmouth_ and the _Advice_, which were all frigates. These informed him that several Algerine war-craft were at Bougie. He called a council of war, at which it was agreed that Spragge should make the best of his way there with the _Mary_, the _Portsmouth_ pink and his fireships, and he should endeavour to destroy these corsairs in their own lair. The _Hampshire_ and the _Portsmouth_ were left to cruise off Algiers till further orders should reach them. The wind was now easterly, and one of his ships, named the _Dragon_, had been gone five days, as she was busy chasing a couple of Algerine corsair craft: but as the wind for some days had been from the south-west, Spragge was in hopes that the chase would have carried the ships to the eastward and thus force the Algerines into Bougie. And so, on the 23rd of April, the _Dragon_ returned to Spragge, having been engaged for two days in fighting the two Algerine craft. Unfortunately her commander, Captain Herbert (whom the reader will remember by his later title when he became the Earl of Torrington), had been shot in the face by a musket shot, and nine of his men had also been wounded with small shot. The wind continued easterly until 28th April, but at eight o’clock that night it flew round to south-west and the weather became very gusty and rainy. This caused Spragge’s _Little Eagle_ fireship to become disabled, and she was dismasted by the wind. But, on the last day of April, Spragge got her fitted with masts again and re-rigged, for luckily he had with him a corn ship captured from the corsairs, and her spars, together with some topmasts and other spars, caused the fireship to be ready again for service. Unfortunately the same bad weather caused the _Warwick_ to spring her mast—an accident that frequently befell the ships of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—so she “bore away to the Christian shore: my Brigantine at the same time bore away, and as yet I have no news of her.”