By July, 1779, Pollock had succeeded in obtaining and mounting twenty-four guns on the decks of his ship, which he had now christened the “Morris” in honor of his well-known friend at Philadelphia. He had appointed a full quota of officers; and he had engaged seventy-six men, with “English deserters arriving daily” to swell the complement. The captain of the “Morris” was William Pickles, a man found to be “capable and steady to our Cause.” Pollock had now for some time been waiting for orders for his vessel from Philadelphia; and tired of delay he was on the point of sending the “Morris” cruising, when a severe hurricane swept over New Orleans doing great damage to the town and its shipping. The “Morris” was lost, and eleven of her crew were drowned; the rest were rescued nine miles below the city clinging to the wreckage of their vessel. Governor Galvez’s heart was touched by the loss of the Americans. He now “spared” Pollock an armed schooner, which was soon fitted out, and by September Pickles was cruising on Lake Pontchartrain. On September 10 Pickles had a short, but hot, dispute with the British armed sloop “West Florida,” which was forced to surrender, although it lost but four men to Pickles’s eight. Pollock now fitted out the “West Florida,” and sent her cruising on the Lake. On September 21 Pickles captured a small British settlement on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. He made prisoners of all the inhabitants who refused to swear allegiance to the United States. This capitulation, Pollock wrote to Congress, gave them an undoubted right to that part of the colony of West Florida which lay along Lake Pontchartrain; and he conceived, in language that sounds familiarly like that of later expansionists, that the capitulation was “a proper Ground on which to claim (at any convenient period) the Sovereignty of the Soil and the Allegiance of the Inhabitants.”[380]