Privateering had attracted many of them, and the navy was finding it difficult to recruit the kind of men it desired.
Lawrence was compelled to sign on a scratch lot, some Portuguese, a few British, and many landlubbers.

Given time to shake them together in hard service at sea, he would have made a smart crew of them no doubt, as Isaac Hull had done in five weeks with the men of the _Constitution_, but destiny ordered otherwise.
In the spring of 1813 the harbor of Boston was blockaded by the thirty-eight-gun British frigate _Shannon_, Captain Philip Vere Broke, who had been in this ship for seven years.

In the opinion of Captain Mahan, "his was one of those cases where singular merit as an officer and an attention to duty altogether exceptional had not yet obtained opportunity for distinction.

It would probably be safe to say that no more thoroughly efficient ship of her class had been seen in the British navy during the twenty years' war with France." Captain Broke was justly confident in his own leadership and in the efficiency of a ship's company, which had retained its identity of organization through so many years of his personal and energetic supervision.

Indeed, the captain of the British flagship on the American station wrote: "The _Shannon's_ men were trained and understood gunnery better than any men I ever saw." Every morning the men were exercised at training the guns and in the afternoon in the use of the broadsword, musket, and pike.