n8 The Story of the New England Whalers 



well known to the Nantucket renegades who were 

 in the British whale fishery. Accordingly, the 

 renegades secured letters of marque, armed their 

 ships, and sailed for the Pacific to prey on their 

 former friends and neighbors. One of them was 

 so eager for plunder that he did not wait for 

 a commission; and he was caught plundering in 

 a way that would have justified the American 

 authorities in hanging him as a pirate. However, 

 the appearance of the United States frigate, 

 Essex, under Commodore David Porter, in the 

 Pacific, not only released the American whalers 

 that the renegades had captured, but all of the 

 British whale ships except one were taken, and 

 the one was compelled to lie idle in harbor while 

 Porter was making his famous cruise. 



The story of the whaler Barclay and Captain 

 Randall is worth giving in some detail because of 

 his connection with the first admiral of the Ameri- 

 can navy, David Glasgow Farragut, on whom he 

 tried to play a practical joke, with results that 

 Farragut remembered all his life. 



While at work off the coast of Peru the Barclay 

 was captured by a Peruvian corsair called the 



