After a few words more the two skippers shook hands and left the café, each bound to the waterfront by a different direction. It was certainly a peculiar position that the Yankee craft found themselves occupying about this time in European waters. Sometimes they would be in a port where lay eight or ten half-dismantled frigates, and over twice as many smaller cruisers and merchantmen belonging to the Empire, all cooped up and kept in there by four or five English sloops of war, or perhaps a guard ship of fifty or sixty guns patrolling up and down the harbor mouth. On the other side of the water, however, the English had succeeded in blockading but one American frigate, the _Constellation_, early in the war. Afterwards for a few months they hemmed in the _United States_, the _Macedonian_, and the little _Hornet_ in the harbor of New London; but what would not the United States have given to have possessed those thousands of idle guns that lay in the French naval stations? She would have manned the helms, spread the sails, and put those great hulks into motion. She might even have done a little "fleet sailing" on her own account. But there was some excuse for France. Napoleon had depleted his seacoasts to fill his armies. There were not sufficient able seamen to answer the demand, and besides, so long had the French run away from the English at sea, that a thirty-eight-gun frigate of the Empire had been known to escape a meeting with a British twenty-gun sloop by turning tail and making off. The French flag was a rarity afloat. So every time the Yankee privateers entered or left a port it was necessary to run the blockade that the British had established at the entrance. As this was the state of the home ports also, they had become quite used to it. Seldom or never were they caught in the act.