At the close of the battle the “Peacock’s” hull had not been touched; aloft, her foreyard was disabled and a few upper stays were cut away; of her crew, two men were slightly wounded,--but this was all the injury sustained in running for three quarters of an hour under the close fire of nine heavy guns.[292] The “Epervier” was reported by Captain Warrington as showing forty-five shot-holes in her hull; masts and rigging much cut up, and twenty-three men killed or wounded in a crew of one hundred and twenty-eight. The difference between the force of the two vessels amply accounted for the capture; but the Admiralty might well show unwillingness to admit the bad condition of the vessels-of-war to which it intrusted the duty of convoying British mercantile shipping.[293] So complete was the “Epervier’s” disaster that no excuse was offered for it, except the plea that she was in almost every respect inferior to the standard that British vessels of her class were supposed to maintain. Captain Warrington saved the “Epervier” and brought her into Savannah in spite of two British frigates encountered on the way. He sailed again early in June, and passed the months of July and August in British waters or in the track of British commerce from the Faroe Islands to the Canaries. He burned or sunk twelve prizes, besides making cartels of two more, and brought his ship through the blockade into New York harbor, October 30, without injury, with only one man lost and the crew in fine health.[294] The third new sloop was named the “Wasp” after the famous victor over the “Hornet.” The new “Wasp” sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, May 1, under command of Johnston Blakeley. Born in Ireland in 1781, Blakeley was from infancy a North Carolinian. He became in 1800 an officer in the navy. Blakeley and the “Wasp” of 1814, like Jones and the “Wasp” of 1813, ran a career in which tragedy gave a deeper tinge than usual to the bloody colors they won; but their success was on the whole greater than that of any other national cruiser from the beginning to the end of the war. Merely as a story of adventure Blakeley’s career was exciting, but romance was its smallest interest. For several reasons the sloop battles and cruises afforded one of the best relative tests of American character and skill among all that were furnished in the early period of the national history; and among the sloops, Blakeley’s “Wasp” was the most distinguished.