These veterans, who “shamed the most ferocious barbarians of antiquity,” (Napier), were sent across the Atlantic to subjugate a people fighting for freedom from equally brutal press gangs. Some of them were sent to the South that they might take New Orleans and so add the whole watershed of the Mississippi to the British domains, and the number sent on that invasion seemed overwhelming. Washington had been taken meantime, and the public buildings, including the national library, burned. The region of the Chesapeake was overrun. The whole Atlantic coast was blockaded by the tremendous fleets that the British were able to send at the end of the European war. And then came other hosts of “Wellington’s Invincibles” to the Sorel River, bound, through the northern gateway, to the head-waters of the Hudson, that they might cut off New England from the middle and southern States. As the reader will remember, the Americans had two small sloops (one-masted vessels) on Lake Champlain during 1813--the _Growler_ and the _Eagle_, each mounting eleven guns. These were sent by Lieutenant Thomas Macdonough in chase of three British gun-boats, and so eager were the Yankee crews that the sloops followed the British into the outlet of the lake and so far toward the St. Lawrence as to arrive in sight of Isle-aux-Noix, where the British had a fort and where three more British gun-boats were lying. It was now the turn of the British to force the fighting, and they gathered in great numbers on both shores of the river, while the gun-boats, that had, as usual, a long gun each, turned and opened fire at long range. The indiscreet zeal of Lieutenant Sydney Smith, who commanded the American sloops, was fatal, for both were captured. To repair the loss thus sustained Macdonough seized a merchant sloop called the _Rising Sun_ (built at Essex, in 1810, for E. A. Boynton), and converted her into a war-vessel by mounting seven long nine-pounders on her deck. She was renamed the _Preble_. But he was unable to secure a sufficient sea-power to prevent an invasion by a British force that reached the Saranac River a little later, though he undoubtedly hastened the retiring of that force and prevented any further invasions during 1813.