But British ships dominated Cape Cod Bay, and the flagship, anchored off Truro, sometimes used the old mill on Mill Hill for a target. On such occasions, says Rich, the inhabitants preferred the eastern side of the hill. Again British seamen used Provincetown as their own, and, individually, established friendly relations ashore; officers often landed to buy fresh provisions for which they paid hard British gold to the considerable profit of the natives; and although some timid farmers kept their cattle in the woods, there is no record of any looting. Mr. Rich remembers an old lady who confessed the girls liked to watch the British barges come in; another recalls that on the way from school one day with a bevy of her mates, they encountered a squad of the British, and making as if to turn aside, were accosted gallantly by the officer. “Don’t leave the road, ladies,” cried he, touching his cap, “we won’t harm you.” It is probable that more than once youth and bright eyes managed some amelioration of the rigors of war. It was a futile war, growing out of old animosities at home and the great Napoleonic conflicts overseas, and all were ready for peace when it came about through the Treaty of Ghent in December, 1814. Yet the war had served Americans well by clearing obstacles in the way of a further development of trade, which again leaped forward with the building of the clipper ships that beat the lumbering East Indiamen on the oceans of the world, and were ready for the swift voyages around the Horn to the gold-fields of the Pacific. For America now had a navy: in the years between the Revolution and the Embargo War, our growing trade, unprotected as it was then, had been at the mercy not only of the European belligerents, but of the Mediterranean corsairs and pirates. For many years regular tribute was paid the Barbary States to buy exemption from attack; and even so it was no unusual thing for offerings to be asked of a Sunday in some Cape Cod meeting-house to defray the ransom of a sailor captured by the Barbary pirates. It was not until after the War of 1812 that the nuisance was stopped by sending a squadron to the Mediterranean under Decatur, when the Dey of Algiers was compelled to a treaty forbidding his profitable exaction of tribute, and Tunis and Tripoli promised to hold our commerce exempt from the depredations of the corsairs. CHAPTER VI THEOLOGY AND WHALING I