With a ship that, figuratively speaking, carried the flag of the “Flying Dutchman,” and with the nucleus of a crew in a mutinous state of mind over a failure to get the prize money to which they believed themselves entitled, Lawrence began fitting out for sea. The wages in the navy then were fair, and the glory of the flag undimmed, but getting sailors for the _Chesapeake_ was the hardest work of the life of her commander. Nor was it merely that she was an unlucky ship. It must not be forgotten that hosts of American seafaring men were then by force serving in the British navy, while more than two thousand of them were then in Dartmoor prison in England, whither they had been sent by such of the English captains as were humane enough not to compel an American to fight against his flag. Of the few American seamen who remained to man American ships not many were found to ship on a man-o’-war. The privateers, of whom some stirring tales remain to be told, had picked them off the streets. The crew which Captain Lawrence obtained was precisely such a crew as a ship fresh from an English port in those days would have had naturally--a crew that was swept up from the streets as a whole, and yet contained a considerable number of experienced, capable men. It was what a football expert would call a scrub team. It was a crew that in six weeks might have been trained by Lawrence to fight as one man, but Lawrence never had the opportunity to train it. The _Chesapeake_ was fitting for a voyage to the east, where she could intercept British ships bound for the St. Lawrence, and thence to the Greenland whale fishery. The _Hornet_, under Master Commandant James Biddle, was to meet the _Chesapeake_ at Cape Canso. Meantime a British ship-of-the-line, and the frigate _Shannon_, Captain Philip Bowes Vere Broke (the ship that had chased the _Constitution_ for three days), had been blockading the port of Boston, but Broke, who was looking for laurels in a single-ship fight with an American frigate, sent the ship-of-the-line away, and alone maintained the blockade. [Illustration: Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke, Bart. _From a lithograph of the portrait by Lane._]