A more complicated adventure befell two Cape men, Mayo and Hill, who were of the crew of Captain Paine, of Truro. In 1811 they cleared for Mediterranean ports with a cargo of fish, but off the coast of Spain they were boarded and searched by a French corvette, and for some reason Mayo and Hill were taken prisoner and landed in Lisbon. There they were attached to a French force that was to convoy a rich pay train through the enemy country, the most dangerous point of which was a deep defile in the mountains some three miles in length. There a murderous fire was opened upon them from the overhanging cliffs, every officer and all but a handful of men killed, and the rest marched off to a Spanish prison. And among the prisoners were Mayo and Hill who had come through the engagement without a scratch. The Frenchmen were inclined to make game of their Yankee fellow-captives, and something of a race war developed. But Mayo “was, like Miles Standish, small of stature but soon red-hot.” He whipped several “Frenchies,” and offered to fight the lot, an invitation, courteously declined, which left him master of the field. Whether by intrigue or not, Hill was condemned as a spy and marched out to be shot when, in the approved style of romance, a horseman in the nick of time dashed up with a reprieve; and Hill had earned his title to “scape-gallows.” In a few months the two Cape men managed somehow to make their way to Flanders, and, after years crammed with adventure, reached home. “Mr. Mayo,” says Rich who tells the story, “died in good old age, in the peace of Christ, having raised a large family of enterprising boys. Like the patriarch, he saw his children’s children to the fourth generation.” Captain Isaiah Crowell, of Yarmouth, had successfully run the blockade at Marseilles after the French decrees were in force; and in 1812, knowing that a strict embargo of ninety days, preliminary to war, was imminent, he loaded hastily at Boston with a cargo for Lisbon, cleared for Eastport, where he gave the first news of the embargo, and cleared there for Lisbon. War having been declared, on his return he was captured by an English cruiser, taken into Saint John’s where his ship was condemned, and he was being returned to the United States on the British sloop-of-war Alert when it was captured by the Yankee Essex. But if Crowell lost in this venture, he was to gain by his skill and daring in many another; and he retired from sea with a comfortable fortune, to live out many humdrum years ashore as a bank president and legislator.