"Britannia needs no bulwarks, No towers along the steep; Her march is o'er the mountain waves, Her home is on the deep." They grew so vain of their lordship of the sea that they needed a lesson, and they were to get one from the Yankee tars. As soon as war began between England and the United States in 1812, a flock of British war-hawks came flying bravely across the seas, thinking they would soon gobble up the Yankee sparrows. But long before the war was over, they quit singing their proud song of "Britannia rules the waves," and found that what they thought was a Yankee sparrow was the American eagle. There were too many great things done on the ocean in this war for me to name them all, so I will have to tell only the most famous. And first of all I must give you the story of the noble old _Constitution_, or, as she came to be called, _Old Ironsides_. The _Constitution_ was a noble ship of the old kind. That royal old craft is still afloat, after more than a hundred years of service, and after all her companions have long since sunk in the waves or rotted away. She was built to fight the French in 1798. She was Commodore Preble's flagship in the war with the Moorish pirates. And she won undying fame in the War of 1812. So the story of the _Constitution_ comes first in our list of the naval conquerors of that war. I fancy, if any of you had been living at that time, you would have wanted to fight the British as badly as the Americans then did. For the British had for years been taking sailors from American ships and making them serve in their own men-of-war. Then, too, they had often insulted our officers upon the seas, and acted in a very insolent and overbearing way whenever they had the opportunity. This made the Americans very angry and was the main cause of the war. I must tell you some things that took place before the war. In 1811 a British frigate named the _Guerriere_ was busy at this kind of work, sailing up and down our coast and carrying off American sailors on pretence that they were British. Just remember the name of the "_Guerriere_." You will soon learn how the _Constitution_ paid her for this shabby work. I have also a story to tell about the _Constitution_ in 1811. She had to cross the Atlantic in that year, and stopped on some business in the harbor of Portsmouth, an English seaport. One night a British officer came on board and said there was an American deserter on his ship, the _Havana_, and that the Americans could have him if they sent for him.