You shall deliver the cargoes to me and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt." Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act.

More than two hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after twenty years.

It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult and bloodshed afloat.

There lingers today in many a coastwise town an inherited dislike for France.

It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe which beggared many a household and filled the streets with haggard, broken shipmasters.
It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage and challenged confiscation.