While the British were approaching the Penobscot on this expedition, this Captain Nicholson, in the thirty-two-gun frigate _Deane_ (sometimes called the _Hague_), and Capt. Samuel Tucker, in the twenty-four-gun _Boston_, sailed on a cruise. They captured six prizes, including a privateer of twenty guns, another of eighteen, and a merchantman armed with sixteen guns. The eighteen-gun privateer was the _Thorn_. After returning to port, Captain Tucker took the _Boston_ to Charleston, and when that place surrendered he was made prisoner, but was soon after exchanged for the captain of the _Thorn_, whom he had captured earlier in the year. Returning to Boston, he was ordered to take command of the captured _Thorn_, and in the cruise that he then made he took seven vessels. As he had captured thirty vessels before he entered the navy, it is likely that Captain Tucker took more prizes during the Revolution than any other commander. When Charleston fell, there were lost with the _Boston_, just mentioned, the frigate _Providence_, of twenty-eight guns; the _Queen of France_, of equal metal, and the _Ranger_, in which John Paul Jones captured the _Blake_. Thereafter, of all the ships that the Congress had built or purchased and placed in service, only six remained in the American navy. These were the _Alliance_, of thirty-two guns, in which Landais had tried to betray John Paul Jones; the _Confederacy_ and the _Deane_, of equal metal; the _Trumbull_, of twenty-eight guns; the _Duc de Lauzan_, of twenty guns, and the _Saratoga_, of eighteen. Worse yet, at the end of 1779 both officers and men were scarce because the British, knowing that the supply of American seamen was limited, had refused to exchange sailor prisoners in order that they might so keep the American forces reduced. And of the seamen available for the navy not a small proportion preferred to sail in privateers because of the chances of great gains found in them. [Illustration] [Illustration: _From a contemporary map at the Lenox Library._] Because of this condition of affairs it happened that when Capt. James Nicholson sailed in the _Trumbull_ on the last day of May, 1780, for a cruise along the American coast his crew contained more landsmen--men and boys who had never been outside of any harbor--than of seamen. With such a mob as this in place of a crew, he fell in with a big British privateer on June 2d. [Illustration: Signature of Samuel Nicholson. _From a letter at the Lenox Library._]