The damages sustained in this battle were scarce repaired when another British privateer appeared, and Talbot again went into action and took her, though of scarce half her size.

In all this little "Argo"-- which, by the way, belonged to Nicholas Low, of New York, an ancestor of the eminent Seth Low--took twelve prizes.
Her commander was finally captured and sent first to the infamous "Jersey" prison-ship, and afterward to the Old Mill Prison in England.
[Illustration: NEARLY EVERY MAN ON THE QUARTERDECK OF THE "ARGO" WAS KILLED OR WOUNDED.] The "Jersey" prison-ship was not an uncommon lot for the bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure.

A Massachusetts privateersman left on record a contemporary account of the sufferings of himself and his comrades in this pestilential hulk, which may well be condensed here to show some of the perils that the adventurers dared when they took to the sea.
[Illustration: THE PRISON SHIP "JERSEY".] After about one-third of the captives made with this writer had been seized and carried away to serve against their country on British war-ships, the rest were conveyed to the "Jersey," which had been originally a 74-gun ship, then cut down to a hulk and moored at the Wallabout, at that time a lonely and deserted place on the Long Island shore, now about the center of the Brooklyn river front.

"I found myself," writes the captive, "in a loathsome prison among a collection of the most wretched and disgusting objects I ever beheld in human form.

Here was a motley crew covered with rags and filth, visages pallid with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, and retaining hardly a trace of their original appearance....