It was such advantages as these that induced the Americans to continue the war. The Americans were inflated with pride. In their own estimation they had become a first rate maritime power, and even in the eyes of Europe, it seemed that they were destined to become so. The disparity in force was justly less considered than the result. However bravely the British commanders had fought their ships, the disasters were no less distressing, politically considered, than if they had been the result of positive weakness or of lamentable cowardice. These advantages even compensated in glory to the Northeastern States for the losses which their commerce had sustained, and would, had they continued very much longer, have stimulated them to forget their selfishness, their bankruptcies, and their privations, though perhaps they tended on the other hand, to cause less vigorous efforts to be made for the acquisition of Canada, than otherwise would have been the case, by rivetting the public attention of America more on the successful operations by sea than on their own disastrous operations by land. There was yet another disaster to overtake Great Britain. And it was little wonder. The Lords of the Admiralty, wedded to old notions, unlike the Heads of the Naval Department of the United States, were slow to alter the build or armament of the national ships. They seemed to think that success must ultimately be dependent upon pluck, and that there could be again few instances in which a sloop could be so disabled by a storm as to be unable to cope with a brig, better manned, better armed, and in good sailing trim. They continued to send slow-sailing brigs and ill-armed sloops-of-war, for the protection of large fleets of merchantmen, with valuable cargoes, while the frigates of the enemy, in search of them, whether in the calm or in the storm, were faster than British seventy-fours, and were equal to British ships of the line in armament. It was after the loss of the _Macedonian_ that the British Admiralty commissioned and sent to sea the frigate _Java_, of the same tonnage, with the same deficiency of men, and, worse than all, half of whom were landsmen, and of exactly the same armament as the _Macedonian_, only that her weight of metal was less, to cope with such frigates as the _United States_, the _President_, and the _Constitution_. On the 12th of November, the _Java_ sailed from Spithead, the remonstrances of Captain Lambert against the inadequacy and inexperience of his crew being of no avail with the authorities. He was told, when he insisted that he was no match for an American, even of equal size, that "a voyage to the East Indies and back would make a good crew." The difficulties in the way of getting to the East Indies, to say nothing of coming back again, never entered into the heads of men, who had long been laid up in ordinary, and were dry-rotting to decay. These were the men who sent the water casks to contain the fresh