Ye wagoners of Freedom Whose chargers chew the cud, Whose wheels have braved a dozen years The gravel and the mud; Your glorious hawbucks yoke again To take another jag, And scud through the mud Where the heavy wheels do drag, Where the wagon creak is long and low And the jaded oxen lag. Columbia needs no wooden walls, No ships where billows swell; Her march is like a terrapin's, Her home is in her shell. To guard her trade and sailor's rights, In woods she spreads her flag. Such ribald nonsense, however, was unfair to a navy which had done magnificently well until smothered and suppressed by sheer weight of numbers. It was in January, 1815, that Captain Decatur finally sailed out of New York harbor in the hope of taking the _President_ past the blockading division which had been driven offshore by a heavy northeast gale. The British ships were struggling back to their stations when they spied the Yankee frigate off the southern coast of Long Island. It was a stern chase, Decatur with a hostile squadron at his heels and unable to turn and fight because the odds were hopeless. The frigate _Endymion_ was faster than her consorts and, as she came up alone, the _President_ delayed to exchange broadsides before fleeing again with every sail set. Her speed had been impaired by stranding as she came out past Sandy Hook, else she might have out-footed the enemy. But soon the _Pomone_ and the _Tenedos_, frigates of the class of the _Shannon_ and the _Guerriere_, were in the hunt. Decatur was cornered, but his guns were served until a fifth of the crew were disabled, the ship was crippled, and a force fourfold greater than his own was closing in to annihilate him at its leisure. "I deemed it my duty to surrender," said he, and a noble American frigate, more formidable than the _Constitution_, was added to the list of the Royal Navy. [Illustration: _A FRIGATE OF 1812 UNDER SAIL_ The _Constellation_, of which this is a photograph, is somewhat smaller than the _Constitution_, being rated at 38 guns as against 44 for the latter. In general appearance, however, and particularly in rig, the two types are very similar. Although the _Constellation_ did not herself see action in the War of 1812, she is a good example of the heavily armed American frigate of that day--and the only one of them still to be seen at sea under sail within recent years. At the present time the _Constellation_ lies moored at the pier of the Naval Training Station, Newport, R.I. Photograph by E. Mueller, Jr., Inc., New York.] CHAPTER VIII THE LAST CRUISE OF THE ESSEX