It should not be inferred from these facts that all the privateers prospered, or even that they generally did so. Privateering was quite as much of a lottery as speculation in gold mines. In the first place, a privateer cost a good deal of money, for that day. The _Governor Tompkins_ cost $20,000. Under Captain Joseph Shumer she carried a crew of one hundred and forty-three men with fourteen guns. Shumer captured twenty vessels. She was then sold at auction for $14,500, and under a new captain tried cruising but never made another capture. The port of New York boasted of one hundred and twenty privateers during this war. The _Scourge_, of nine guns and one hundred and ten men, took twenty-seven prizes. The _Saratoga_, of sixteen guns and one hundred and forty men, took twenty-two prizes. The _Prince de Neufchâtel_, Captain J. Ordronaux, with seventeen guns and one hundred and twenty-seven men, took eighteen prizes. The _Divided We Fall_, with but three guns and fifty men, took sixteen prizes, while her sister ship, _United We Stand_, got but one. Of the whole one hundred and twenty, only forty-one got any prizes at all, and of the forty-one, seven got but one prize each, and eleven but two. When court fees and duties on the goods captured had been paid there was so little left for the privateers and their crews that the ships capturing only two prizes really made nothing for the owners. Only about one privateer in five, sailing out of the port of New York, paid a cent of profit to the owners. Many were lost altogether--were captured by the enemy, and these were lost because the militia crews, like shore militia, became panic-stricken at an inopportune time. After recalling the fact that the London _Times_ said in March, 1813, that the Yankee privateers had captured five hundred British ships in seven months, the story of the doings of these mosquitoes during 1812 may very well conclude with the accounts of two battles off the South American coast in the month of December of that year. The first was that between the American brig _Montgomery_, Captain Upton, of Boston, and the British war-brig _Surinam_, mounting guns common to such brigs--eighteen short thirty-twos and two long nines--a better armament, in fact, than the _Peacock_ had when defeated by the _Hornet_, for the _Peacock_ had twenty-fours instead of thirty-twos. On December 6th the _Montgomery_ got alongside of the _Surinam_ by mistake, and, although armed with but ten six-pounders and two short eighteens, she remained there for half an hour, when the _Surinam_ was glad to let her go. The _Surinam_ threw 297 pounds of metal at a broadside, or eighteen pounds more than the _Hornet_ threw in fighting the _Peacock_. The _Montgomery_ threw 48 pounds of metal at a broadside--allowing that the American shot were of full weight. [Illustration: Battle between the Schooner _Saratoga_ and the Brig _Rachel_. _From a lithograph in Coggeshall’s “Privateers.”_]