Naval War of 1812 67 



above-mentioned officers, in urging the necessity of 

 building line-of-battle ships, state that it was hard 

 work' to recruit men for vessels of an inferior grade, 

 so long as the enemy had ships of the line. 



One of the standard statements made by the 

 British historians about this war is that our ships 

 were mainly or largely manned by British sailors. 

 This, if true, would not interfere with the lessons 

 which it teaches ; and, besides that, it is not true. 



In this, as in everything else, all the modern 

 writers have merely followed James or Brenton, 

 and I shall accordingly confine myself to examin 

 ing their assertions. The former begins (Vol. IV, 

 p. 470) by diffidently stating that there is a "simi 

 larity" of language between the inhabitants of the 

 two countries an interesting philological discovery 

 that but few will attempt to controvert. In Vol. 

 VI, p. 154, he mentions that a number of blanks 

 occur in the American Navy List in the column 

 "Where Born" ; and in proof of the fact that these 

 blanks are there because the men were not Ameri 

 cans, he says that their names "are all English and 

 Irish." 7 They certainly are ; and so are all the other 



7 For example, James writes: "Out of the 32 captains one 

 only, Thomas Tingey, has England marked as his birth 

 place. . . . Three blanks occur, and we consider it rather 

 creditable to Captains John Shaw, Daniel S. Patterson, and 

 John Ord Creighton that they were ashamed to tell where 

 they were born." I have not been able to find out the lat- 

 ter's birth-place, but Captain Shaw was born in New York, 

 and I have seen Captain Patterson incidentally alluded to as 

 "born and bred in America." Generally, whenever I have 

 been able to fill up the vacancies in the column "Where 

 Born," I have found that it was in America. From these 



