She was a beautiful ship, a sloop-of-war called large and heavy in that day. Like her sister ships, the _Peacock_ and the _Frolic_, of whose deeds something was told in the last chapter, she was designed to outsail and outweigh, and so conquer with ease, the sloops-of-war of the British navy. Her keel was stretched on blocks beside that of her sister, the _Frolic_, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On the day the _Epervier_, the first prize of her sister, the _Peacock_, reached Savannah on May 1, 1814, the new _Wasp_ winged her way through the British blockaders that lay off Whaleback Reef, and headed away to the east, bound for the coast of England. [Illustration: Johnston Blakeley. _From an engraving by Gimbrede._] No finer crew by nature than that of the _Wasp_ ever sailed from any port. She was commanded by Master-Commandant Johnston Blakeley, of Wilmington, North Carolina. He had not in any way especially distinguished himself thus far in the war, but that no mistake was made in giving him the command was evident later on. First Lieutenant James Reilly and Third Lieutenant Frederick Baury had served in the _Constitution_ when she captured both the _Guerrière_ and the _Java_, while Second Lieutenant T. G. Tillinghast was the second lieutenant of the _Enterprise_ when she whipped the _Boxer_. Of the younger officers not a man but was worthy of his place, and as for the crew they were to a man Americans, and almost all of them Yankees of the Yankees--the typical New Englanders whose drawling, nasal style of speech has for time out of mind served English writers as an abundant source of amusement. That they talked about the “keows” and the “critters” need not be doubted. They were young haymakers and wood-choppers--very likely more than one-half of them were from the farms. As one of her officers wrote they were men “whose ages average only twenty-three years. The greatest part (are) so green, that is, unaccustomed to the sea, that they were sick for a week.” But that some of them had looked through the sights of a rifle at running deer, to the destruction of the deer, is also certain, as will appear farther on, and the back that could swing a scythe could lend vigor to the stroke of a cutlass or the lunge of a boarding-pike. They were not only good physically but mentally. They were from the “deestrict” schools, on one hand, and from “teown meetin’” on the other--they had common school educations, and they were independent-minded voters, while the traditions which their fathers had told them before the wide fireplaces of their log-cabin homes were of the deeds done along shore by British naval officers, beginning with that of the infamous Mowatt when nearby Portland (Falmouth) was burned in winter, and ending, very likely, when John Deguyo was taken by a press-gang from a Portland coaster when she was in the waters of New York Harbor. Unaccustomed to the sea they certainly were, but under such officers as they had, the training of a