It is interesting, in view of the changes in British naval ideas which the two American frigates they captured wrought, to note that in Peake’s “Rudiments of Naval Architecture,” a British work, formerly a text-book in all English-speaking navies, the ideal frigate there described has a gun-deck length of one hundred and seventy-six feet, a breadth of fifty-two feet, and a depth of hold of only seventeen feet--which, if slang be permitted, is “seeing” the American model and “going several better.” The _President_ was one hundred and seventy-five feet long by forty-five broad and twenty deep. And as for guns, while the Yankees of 1812 used long twenty-fours for the main-deck battery, to the infinite amusement as well as the scorn of the British, Peake’s ideal frigate carried six long eight-inch guns (sixty-eight-pounders!) and twenty-two long thirty-twos, besides twenty-two thirty-twos on the upper deck that were only a foot shorter-than those below. Thus they had, with experience, added to the weight of the broadside they found on the _President_ one hundred and forty-three pounds, and by the use of long upper-deck guns they had vastly increased the effectiveness of a broadside. CHAPTER X THE NAVY AT THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS THE BRITISH GRAB AT THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI--STOPPED AT LAKE BORGNE BY THE YANKEE GUNBOATS UNDER LIEUTENANT THOMAS AP CATESBY JONES--THE BRITISH CAME FIVE TO ONE IN NUMBERS AND ALMOST FOUR TO ONE IN WEIGHT OF METAL--DEFENDING THE _SEAHORSE_ WITH FOURTEEN MEN AGAINST ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE--THE FULL BRITISH FORCE DRIVEN UPON TWO GUNBOATS--A MOST HEROIC DEFENCE THAT LASTED, IN SPITE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS, MORE THAN ONE HOUR--INDOMITABLE SAILING-MASTER GEORGE ULRICH--A FIGHT, THE MEMORY OF WHICH STILL HELPS TO PRESERVE THE PEACE--WORK OF THE _CAROLINE_ AND THE _LOUISIANA_. Small space is given in ordinary histories to the doings of the Navy in connection with the defence of New Orleans, when it was attacked by the British at the end of the War of 1812. As the reader will remember, the expedition against New Orleans was planned for the purpose of wresting from the United States the whole valley of the Mississippi. As France had endeavored in the eighteenth century to establish an empire, extending from the Great Lakes through the Mississippi water-shed to the Gulf of Mexico, that should hem in the British colonies on the Atlantic, so now the English strove to gain possession of what has become the heart of the American republic. The reader has only to consider what would have been the consequences of British possession of the metropolis of the Louisiana purchase to understand how the British Government has always looked ahead when seeking for territorial aggrandizement.