[1] A frigate was a ship designed to be a fast, armed cruiser and mounted from twenty to fifty guns; when a naval vessel mounted less than twenty guns she became a sloop of war, and when she mounted more than fifty guns she became a line-of-battle ship. The frigate was always a favorite type of vessel with the officers and men of the navy, as she was faster and more easily handled than a line-of-battle ship, and was at the same time a more powerful fighting and cruising vessel than a sloop of war. Frigate-built means having the substantial construction, arrangement of the decks, masts, spars, rigging, and guns of a frigate. [2] When peace was declared in 1783, the Government of the United States sold or otherwise disposed of all its vessels, a fact that was quickly taken advantage of by the Barbary corsairs. They at once began to prey upon American merchant shipping in the Mediterranean and even in the Atlantic, and made slaves of the captured crews. The French and English, too, in their wars with each other, by no means respected the neutrality of American commerce, the former being the worse offenders. It was not, however, until 1794 that Congress again authorized the formation of a navy, under the Secretary of War, and in 1798 the office of Secretary of the Navy was created. Among the vessels built in 1794-98 was the frigate _Constitution_, the famous “Old Ironsides” which still survives. The separate States had meanwhile maintained vessels for the protection of their own coasts, and, of course, there had been no cessation in the building of merchant ships during the period preceding the War of 1812. [3] A typean was the head merchant of one of the Company’s “factories” or mercantile houses, such as were later known in China as “hongs.” [4] _Annus Mirabilis_, stanza 89 (1667). [5] Second American edition, translated by H. Reeve, pp. 403-4. [6] _New York Commercial_, October 8, 1851. [7] William John, in an article on clipper ships in _Naval Science_, vol. ii. (1873), p. 265.