When Chauncey got away from port he sailed up to the head of the lake. The British brig _Magnet_ was found in the Niagara River, and her crew burned her and fled ashore when the Yankee _Sylph_, a brig of slightly superior force, was sent in to attack her. Leaving three brigs to blockade the Niagara, Chauncey sent the brig _Jones_ cruising alongshore between Sackett’s Harbor and Oswego, and with his four ships went to Kingston and blockaded Sir James Yeo’s four ships that were in the port. The American force was “superior by about fifteen per cent., and Sir James Yeo very properly declined to fight with the odds against him although it was a nicer calculation than British commanders had been accustomed to enter into.” But in blockading Kingston Chauncey refused to co-operate with the American army in a well-considered plan for invading Canada, and this refusal was all, as it now appears, that stood in the way of capturing Kingston and the British fleet. He wrote, when asked to co-operate in the invasion of Canada, that he thought the request was a “sinister attempt to render us subordinate to, or an appendage of, the army.” Then, in an attempt to pose as a gallant knight, he writes that, “to deprive the enemy of an apology for not meeting me, I have sent ashore four guns from the _Superior_, to reduce her armor in number to an equality with the _Prince Regent’s_, yielding the advantage of their sixty-eight pounders.” He “yielded the advantage” of the sixty-eights but retained the advantage of long thirty-twos over long twenty-fours, something he was dishonest enough to omit mentioning. Save for the transportation of 3,000 soldiers from Sackett’s Harbor to the mouth of the Genesee River Chauncey did nothing but blockade Kingston until the liner of one hundred guns (called the _St. Lawrence_) was completed there. Then he retired to Sackett’s Harbor. The young officers under him were apparently worthy of an efficient commander--of one who, like Perry, would say, “To windward or leeward they shall fight to-day;” for when Lieutenant Gregory, with Midshipman Hart and six men, while scouting in Kingston Harbor, fell in with two barges and thirty men, the thirty men conquered only after they had killed Hart and wounded the lieutenant and four of his six men. And then, just before the close of navigation Midshipman McGowan headed an expedition into Kingston to blow up the new British liner with a torpedo. This expedition fell in with two of the enemy’s guard-boats, and captured both of them. It is not unlikely that they would have succeeded in destroying the liner but for the fact that she was not in the harbor. Sir James Yeo got out of Kingston with his new liner and the rest of his squadron on October 15th and assisted the British army on the Niagara frontier, until November 21st, when the ice ended navigation. [Illustration: One of the Unlaunched Lake Vessels. _From a photograph._]