richoched until it fairly passed our fore-foot, distant a hundred yards, making its last leap from the water precisely in a line with the stem of the Dawn.  This was unequivocal evidence that the game could not last much longer, unless the space between the two vessels should be sensibly widened.  Fortunately, we now opened Montauk fort, and the option was offered us of doubling that point, and entering the sound, or of standing oh towards Block Island, and putting the result on our heels.  After a short consultation with Marble, I decided on the first.

One of the material advantages possessed by a man-of-war in a chase with a merchant vessel, is in the greater velocity with which her crew can make or take in sail.  I knew that the moment we began to touch our braces, tacks and sheets, that the Leander would do the same, and that she would effect her objects in half the time in which we could effect ours.  Nevertheless, the thing was to be done, and we set about the preparations with care and assiduity.  It was a small matter to round in our weather braces, until the yards were nearly square, but the rigging out of her studding-sail booms, and the setting of the sails, was a job to occupy the Dawn’s people several minutes.  Marble suggested that by edging gradually away, we should bring the Leander so far on our quarter as to cause the after-sails to conceal what we were about forward, and that we might steal a march on our pursuers by adopting this precaution.  I thought the suggestion a good one, and the necessary orders were given to carry it out.

Any one might be certain that the Englishman’s glasses were levelled on us the whole time.  Some address was used, therefore, in managing to get our yards in without showing the people at the braces.  This was done by keeping off first, and then by leading the ropes as far forward as possible, and causing the men to haul on them, seated on deck.  In this manner we got our yards nearly square, or as much in as our new course required, when we sent hands aloft, forward, to get out the lee booms.  But we reckoned without our host.  John Bull was not to be caught in that way.  The hands were hardly in the lee fore rigging, before I saw the fifty falling off to our course, her yards squared, and signs aboard her that she had larboard studding sails as well as ourselves.  The change of course had one good effect, however:  it brought our pursuer so far on our quarter, that, standing at the capstan, I saw him through the mizen rigging.  This took the Dawn completely from under the Leander’s broadside, leaving us exposed to merely four or five of her forward guns, should she see fit to use them.  Whether the English were reluctant to resort to such very decided means of annoyance, so completely within the American waters, as we were clearly getting to be, or whether they had so much confidence in their speed, as to feel no necessity for firing, I never knew; but they did not have any further recourse to shot.