Of the seventeen war-ships, big and little, that were named on the register of the American Navy when war was declared in 1812, the _Adams_, rated as a twenty-eight-gun frigate, lay at Washington. It had been determined to alter this ship into what was known as a corvette. Readers not trained to a life at sea not infrequently find themselves puzzled by the terms applied to the old style war-ships, and no term is quite so annoying as that of corvette, for the reason that it is used interchangeably with sloop-of-war. The dictionaries do not help one very much. In a “Vocabulaire des Termes de Marine” printed in 1783, a corvette is said to be “a general name for sloops-of-war and all vessels under twenty guns,” but it is manifest, from a consideration of the size and force of the _Adams_ and other American vessels called corvettes, that American officers applied the name only to the largest ships that had one deck of guns only, with neither a poop nor a forecastle. [Illustration: United States Razee* _Independence_ at Anchor. _From the “Kedge Anchor.”_ * A Razee is a line-of-battle ship from which the upper deck has been cut, leaving her with two decks of guns.] A most remarkable ship was the _Adams_, for, when let to a contractor to build, he sublet one side of her to another man who had the instincts of a thief and of a traitor. The sub-contractor, to increase his profits, scamped his timbers and his work. The _Adams_ was a creditable ship on one side and a fraud on the other. It is a pity that the name of the scoundrel has not been perpetuated in the accounts of naval matters that have hitherto appeared. When altered at Washington it was necessary, of course, to follow the old lines and she was still lopsided, although lengthened until she could carry twenty-eight guns on the one deck. Her armament in her new fashion included a long twelve for a bow-chaser and thirteen medium-length eighteen-pounders (called Columbiads, sometimes) on each side. It was a pretty good armament for that day, in fact much superior to the ordinary sloop-of-war armament that was made up of two long twelves and twenty of the wretched short thirty-twos. [Illustration: Charles Morris. _From a photograph owned by Mr. C. B. Hall._]