In this wonderful action, which from beginning to end lasted only fifteen minutes, the "Chesapeake," out of twenty officers, lost seventeen in killed and wounded. Even had this worst of all disasters not befallen her, she might perhaps have still been captured, for as we know her crew were not prepared to fight, having had no training. But had not Lawrence and Ludlow both fallen at the critical moment when the two ships fouled, it is certain that one or the other of them would have prolonged the contest, and that the enemy's loss, large as it was, would have been larger yet. The two ships were carried into Halifax with their wounded captains still on board, but Lawrence died before he reached the shore. Captain Broke, whose wounds were not so serious, recovered, and was made a baronet for his victory, which, as neither friend nor enemy could deny, had been gallantly and bravely won. Of the officers engaged on one side or the other in that eventful battle, many were killed or died of their wounds, and nearly all who survived the fight have long since been gathered to their fathers; but it is a strange fact that the highest officer in Her Majesty's Navy to-day, the senior Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Provo Wallis, was the lieutenant who took the "Shannon" into Halifax after her bloody victory three quarters of a century ago. CHAPTER XIII. THE CRUISE OF THE "ESSEX." Of the vessels in commission at the opening of the war, a fine frigate of the third class was the "Essex," very fast, but poorly armed with carronades. She had been for some months under the command of Captain Porter, of whom we have heard in the war with France, and whose life had already been so full of active service, that though only two-and-thirty years of age, we think of him as a much older man. The "Essex" had first got to sea for a war-cruise on the 3d of August, and soon after, on a hazy night, she came up with a fleet of the enemy's transports sailing under the convoy of a frigate. Stealing up silently alongside the rearmost transport, Porter ordered her to draw out of the convoy on pain of being fired into. This order the transport hastened to obey; and the convoying ship, fearing that by delay she might lose all her convoy, went on her way without molesting the captor. The transport had one hundred and fifty troops on board; and Porter, putting all the prisoners on their parole, ransomed the prize and left her to make her own way into port.