Captain Hickey and his crew had been serving together in the same ship for many years before, in the course of which period they had acquired so thorough an acquaintance with one another, that this great trial, instead of loosening the discipline, only augmented its compactness, and thus enabled the commander to bring all his knowledge, and all the resources of his vigorous understanding, to bear at once, with such admirable effect, upon the difficulties by which he was surrounded. There are some men who actually derive as much credit from their deportment under the severest losses, as others earn by brilliant success; and it may certainly be said that Captain Hickey is one of these: for, although he had the great misfortune to lose his ship, he must enjoy the satisfaction of knowing, that his skill and firmness, rendered effective by the discipline he had been so many years in perfecting, enabled him, in this last extremity, to save the lives of more than a hundred persons, who, but for him, in all human probability, must have perished. CHAPTER XI. BLOCKADING A NEUTRAL PORT. In the summer of 1804, His Majesty’s ships Leander and Cambrian were ordered to proceed off New York, to watch the motions of two French frigates lying in that harbour. On board of one of these, I forget which, Jerome Buonaparte had taken his passage to Europe. This plan of lying off a neutral port to watch for the departure of an enemy riding at anchor within it, is, I believe, still considered, by some people, a measure of questionable propriety, in a national point of view. It is one of those topics, however, which will probably never be quite settled; as circumstances must arise in every war to render it less inexpedient to risk offending a neutral power, on a doubtful point of international usage, than to suffer an enemy to escape. Be the political aspect of this point, however, what it may, there can be no doubt of the excessive and very reasonable annoyance of such a proceeding to the neutral nation, whose rights of hospitality are thus, more or less, virtually infringed. It is pretty certain, I believe, that our lying so long off the harbour of New York, blockading these two French ships, contributed materially to foster those angry feelings against us, which, some years afterwards, broke out into open war. The blockading service at any time is a tedious one; but upon this occasion we contrived to enliven it in a manner, which, whether legitimate or not, was certainly highly exciting, and sometimes rather profitable, to us.