On making full allowance for a captain’s disposition to boast unduly of the qualities of his ship, it is still fair to say that Dacres considered her at any rate equal to the _Shannon_, although the _Shannon_ carried more guns. To strengthen this conclusion it may be added that Captain Dacres sent a challenge to Captain Rodgers of the _President_, which was a sister ship to the _Constitution_. Further than that we have the words of Captain Dacres when he was court-martialled for losing her: “I am so well aware that the success of my opponent was owing to _fortune_, that it is my earnest wish, and would be the happiest moment of my life, to be once more opposed to the _Constitution_ in a frigate of similar force to the _Guerrière_.” These assertions must appear to every reader to be a confession of faith in his ship. Nor was Captain Dacres alone in his belief that she was a good one. “The _Guerrière_ is as fine a frigate as we can boast of,” said the St. Christopher’s _Gazette_ in the same year, while lamenting her loss. What the English newspapers thought of the _Constitution_ before this battle with the _Guerrière_ is also worth repeating. The opinions they expressed were, of course, a repetition of those expressed by British naval officers, who had visited her at various times, but notably after she had called at Portsmouth as related in a preceding chapter. They spoke of her as “a bunch of pine boards,” and as “a fir-built ship with a bit of striped bunting at her mast-head,” and “their opinions gave rise to various excellent jokes that were uttered in and out of the British Parliament at the commencement of the war.” To these statements must be added the further fact that the boastful captain of the _Guerrière_ had taken the trouble to notify the Americans that his ship “was not the _Little Belt_,” referring to the affair in which the _Little Belt_ was so severely pounded by a Yankee frigate. The _Constitution_ sailed from Boston on August 2, 1812. Captain Hull had reported his escape from the British squadron in a modest letter to the Navy Department, but he did not wait for further orders from the Secretary. He conjectured that his narrow escape would so frighten the timid officials, who had previously warned him in his official instructions not to voluntarily engage any superior force, that they would keep him lying inactive in port. In this conjecture he was entirely right, for a few days after he had sailed, orders to that effect did arrive. A good naval authority says that “had the _Constitution_ been captured on the cruise, Hull would have been hanged or shot for sailing without orders.” It has often been a matter of consolation to American naval officers in these last years of the nineteenth century to read of the incapacity and cowardice of department officials in the early years of it.