Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston sent some splendid armed ships to sea but not with the impetuous rush nor in anything like the numbers enrolled by this gray old town whose fame was unique.
For the most part, the records of all these brave ships and the thousands of men who sailed and sweated and fought in them are dim and scanty, no more than routine entries in dusty log-books which read like this: "Filled away in pursuit of a second sail in the N.W.At 4.30 she hoisted English colors and commenced firing her stern guns.

At 5.90 took in the steering sails, at the same time she fired a broadside.

We opened a fire from our larboard battery and at 5.30 she struck her colors.

Got out the boats and boarded her.

She proved to be the British brig Acorn from Liverpool to Rio Janeiro, mounting fourteen cannon." * But now and then one finds in these old sea-journals an entry more intimate and human, such as the complaint of the master of the privateer Scorpion, cruising in 1778 and never a prize in sight.