To balance this, however, came two brilliant actions by small ships. The new _Peacock_, named for the captured British brig, under Captain Lewis Warrington, stole past the blockade of New York. Off the Florida coast on the 29th of April she sighted a convoy and attacked the escort brig of eighteen guns, the _Epervier_. In this instance the behavior of the American vessel and her crew was supremely excellent and not a flaw could be found. They hulled the British brig forty-five times and made a shambles of her deck and did it with the loss of one man. Even more sensational was the last cruise of the _Wasp_, Captain Johnston Blakely, which sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in May and roamed the English Channel to the dismay of all honest British merchantmen. The brig-of-war _Reindeer_ endeavored to put an end to her career but nineteen minutes sufficed to finish an action in which the _Wasp_ slaughtered half the British crew and thrice repelled boarders. This was no light task, for as Michael Scott, the British author of _Tom Cringle's Log_, candidly expressed it: In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery deck of an enemy's vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against them... I don't like Americans. I never did and never shall like them. I have no wish to eat with them, drink with them, deal with or consort with them in any way; but let me tell the whole truth,--_nor fight_ with them, were it not for the laurel to be acquired by overcoming an enemy so brave, determined, and alert, and every way so worthy of one's steel as they have always proved. Refitting in a French port, the dashing Blakely took the _Wasp_ to sea again and encountered a convoy in charge of a huge, lumbering ship of the line. Nothing daunted, the _Wasp_ flitted in among the timid merchant ships and snatched a valuable prize laden with guns and military stores. Attempting to bag another, she was chased away by the indignant seventy-four and winged it in search of other quarry until she sighted four strange sails. Three of them were British war brigs in hot pursuit of a Yankee privateer, and Johnston Blakely was delighted to play a hand in the game. He selected his opponent, which happened to be the _Avon_, and overtook her in the darkness of evening. Before a strong wind they foamed side by side, while the guns flashed crimson beneath the shadowy gleam of tall canvas. Thus they ran for an hour and a half, and then the _Avon_ signaled that she was beaten, with five guns dismounted, forty-two men dead or wounded, seven feet of water in the hold, the magazine flooded, and the spars and rigging almost destroyed.