Tom Cringle, after detailing with a lively description the capture of a Yankee privateer, says that she was assigned to him for his next command.

He had seen her under weigh, had admired her trim model, her tapering spars, her taut cordage, and the swiftness with which she came about and reached to windward.

He thus describes the change the British outfitters made in her: "When I had last seen her she was the most beautiful little craft, both in hull and rigging, that ever delighted the eyes of a sailor; but the dock yard riggers and carpenters had fairly bedeviled her at least so far as appearances went.

First, they had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy, solid bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel, that formerly floated on the foam light as a seagull, now looked like a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger.

Her long, slender wands of masts, which used to swing about as if there were neither shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as church-steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays, and back-stays, and the devil knows what all." It is a curious fact that no nation ever succeeded in imitating these craft.