Orleans, of bolder kidney, it would seem, rejected a like demand, and repulsed several landing parties. It may be said that the village of Orleans lay inland at a safer distance from ship’s guns. In December the British frigate Newcastle ran ashore near Orleans, and, floated with some difficulty, sent a four-oared barge into Rock Harbor and captured therein a schooner and three sloops, two of which, being aground, were fired but were saved by the natives. Prize crews were put aboard the other sloop and the schooner, and anchor weighed for Provincetown. But the schooner, under command of a Yankee pilot who emulated the example of Captain Mayo, of Eastham, ran her ashore on the Yarmouth flats, and the crew were sent prisoners to Salem. Meantime the Orleans militia had driven off the landing force; and sixty years later the surviving heroes or their widows received a bounty of one hundred and sixty acres of public land for their prowess at “the battle of Orleans.” Boat after boat in the bay was taken by the British, and usually released after the captors had replenished their stores from the cargoes. The Two Friends of Provincetown, taken off Gloucester, was sent to Nova Scotia, as, also, was the Victory of Yarmouth. But the master of the Victory saved his captor, the Leander, from being wrecked on some dangerous shoals and received as reward an order on the Governor of Halifax for his schooner and a safe-conduct home for himself and his crew. On the other side of the account, many Cape Cod captains made successful ventures in privateering. Captain Reuben Rich, of Wellfleet, captured an East Indiaman on the first day out, and cleared seventeen thousand dollars for his share in the transaction; men from Brewster, Truro, Eastham likewise made satisfactory cruises under letters of marque. Cape Cod fishermen served in these privateers and in the navy, and sometimes were captured, and many a man from Cape Cod was familiar with the interior of Dartmoor Prison. The last survivor of them, at Truro, lived well into the opening of a new era, and died in 1878 at the ripe age of ninety. Two Harwich men were in the fight between the Constitution and Guerrière, and no doubt could sing with gusto: “You thought our frigates were but few, And Yankees could not fight, Until bold Hull the Guerrière took, And banished her from sight. _Chorus_: “Ye parliaments of England, ye Lords and Commons too, Consider well what you’re about and what you mean to do; You are now at war with Yankee boys, and soon you’ll rue the day You roused the sons of Liberty in North America.” The “sons of Liberty,” although consecrated by no such spirit as won the war for independence, had considerable ground for exultation.