As the reader will remember, the _United States_ sailed on the cruise during which she captured the _Macedonian_ with Commodore John Rodgers of the _President_, the _Congress_ and the _Argus_ being also of the squadron. The _President_ proved unlucky on that voyage, for she got nothing. Her hard luck continued in the cruise that followed. In company with the _Congress_, Captain John Smith, the _President_ sailed from Boston on April 30, 1813. Two days later the little British sloop-of-war _Curlew_, Captain Michael Head, was seen, but after a protracted chase the _Curlew_ escaped. A little later the two frigates separated and the _Congress_ cruised in the South Atlantic all the summer and part of the fall, and finally returned to Portsmouth, New Haven, having been at sea two hundred and nineteen days and taken four merchant-ships. The _President_ cruised first on the Grand Banks, then near the Azores, and from there sailed to the north and around the Shetland Islands to the port of Bergen, where she stopped for supplies. Sailing thence she eventually got back to the Nantucket Shoals on September 23d. There she fell in with the British schooner _Highflyer_, and by posing as a British frigate and sending a lieutenant dressed in a British uniform on board of her, succeeded in getting the book of private signals and instructions. Meantime, while off North Cape in company with the American privateer _Scourge_, Rodgers was chased by two British ships. He said in his journal that the two were “a line-of-battle ship and a frigate.” The British say that the two were the thirty-two-gun frigate _Alexandria_ (she carried long twelves for her main battery) and the sloop _Spitfire_, of about twenty guns. There seems to be no reason for doubting that Rodgers did make the mistake attributed to him. Others made mistakes like that, as will appear farther on. The book captured from the _Highfiyer_ proved valuable in a variety of ways, but chiefly because it gave the numbers and stations of British war-ships on the American coast, and so enabled American commanders to avoid the British squadrons. A private circular from the British Admiralty ordered the captains of all British war-ships to make special efforts to capture the _President_.