During the great European war, the armed ships of France and England were in the habit of conducting their prizes into the Barbary ports and there selling them; a number of American vessels were indeed thus disposed of by the French, under the infamous Decrees of Berlin and Milan. The British Government, not content with this species of neutrality, sent Admiral Freemantle with a squadron to Tunis and Tripoli, and thus obtained from each of these powers, an engagement not to suffer any of the belligerents on the other side, to bring British vessels as prizes into its ports. After the declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain, no American armed vessel had ventured to pass the Streights of Gibraltar, until December 1814, when the privateer brig Abællino, from Boston, commanded by W. F. Wyer, entered the Mediterranean and took a number of prizes, some of which were sent into Tunis and Tripoli. On the arrival of the first of these prizes at Tunis, Mr. Noah, the American Consul, at the request of the master, applied to the Bey for permission to sell her and her cargo. Mahmoud in reply showed him the engagement with Great Britain, which forbade his granting such a license; and the British Consul threatened, in case it were allowed, to send to Sicily for a squadron, in order to avenge this infraction of the treaty with his country. License to sell the vessel was however obtained by Mr. Noah, and she was accordingly disposed of with her cargo, Prince Mustapha the Bey's youngest son, contriving by fraud and by force, to become the purchaser of the greater part of the cargo, at very reduced prices. Information of this having been conveyed to Admiral Penrose, who commanded the British naval forces on the Sicily Station, he sent a ship of the line and two brigs of war to Tunis, with a letter to the Bey, enjoining him to arrest the sale of the prize, and to forbid admission to others in future. With the latter requisition Mahmoud declared his readiness to comply; and two other prizes having soon after been sent in by Captain Wyer, he permitted the British to take possession of them, although they were at the time actually at anchor under the guns of the Goletta fortress. The vessels were immediately carried to Malta, where they were restored to their original owners, the prize crews being retained as prisoners.[2] [Footnote 2: It may be proper here to observe, that although the treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain, had been signed at Ghent on the 24th December 1814, and ratified at Washington on the 17th of February 1815, yet a space of forty days after the ratification was allowed by the terms of that treaty, during which all prizes taken by either party in the Mediterranean, were to be retained; and hostilities were in fact continued in that sea until the 29th of March.]