By hard work after the battle, the Yankee seamen got all three ships in sailing order before 2 o’clock next morning, and they sailed to Porto Praya, in the island of St. Jago, Cape de Verde, where they arrived on March 10, 1815. Here a merchant brig was employed as a cartel to carry the prisoners. The next day came on with a thick fog lying low over the water while the air above the top-gallant yards was comparatively clear. The Americans were busy at 12.05 o’clock (noon) transferring the prisoners, when a large sail was seen from the deck standing into the harbor. There was plainly no lookout aloft, and Captain Stewart was well-nigh caught napping. Stewart, however, was cool enough for the emergency, and had all hands called to their quarters to go out and meet the new ship, but when this was done two other huge sails were seen and it became evident that three large frigates were coming into the harbor. As was eventually learned, they were the fifty-gun frigate _Newcastle_, Captain Lord George Stewart; the fifty-gun frigate _Leander_, Captain Sir Ralph Collier, K.C.B., and the forty-gun _Acasta_, Captain Robert Kerr, ships that should have been blockading Boston when the _Constitution_ escaped. Either of the larger ships was an overmatch for the _Constitution_. It was a neutral port, but the British regard for neutrality had been shown at Valparaiso and Fayal, and there was nothing to do but to run for liberty. Signalling to his prizes to follow, Captain Stewart cut his cable, and so well-trained were the American officers and men that within ten minutes from the time the first ship of the enemy was seen, the _Constitution_ and her two prizes were standing out of the harbor together. Though less spectacular than the manœuvres in the battle, the celerity, skill, and unanimity with which the Americans executed this movement show their seamanship quite as plainly. As the American ships sailed through the fog the guns in the battery on shore began to roar. A number of prisoners who had been on shore on the business of fitting the cartel for sea had taken possession of the Portuguese forts and were firing signal-guns to attract the attention of the British ships. But the British ships were coming from the south--they were beating up against a good northeast breeze, and the Yankee and her prizes hugged the east side of the port and slipped out very well to windward of the enemy. Until clear of the north point of the harbor the Yankees sailed under nothing higher than their top-sails; not even their higher yards were across, and so it happened that they escaped the eyes of the British lookouts. But when the point was cleared, top-gallant sail and royal-yards were crossed and the sails instantly spread to the breeze, to the astonishment of the lookouts perched above the fog-bank on the British ships. To them it was as if the Yankee sails had grown by magic up into the air and were sailing unsupported on the top of a cloud.