Don’t give up the ship

By Lex, on November 16, 2006

So said Captain James Lawrence, the mortally wounded CO of the USS Chesapeake as he was being carried below. Our infant Navy had grown a bit impetuous perhaps after USS Constitutionunder Isaac Hull battered HMS Guerriere to bits and after her next CO, William Bainbridge sent whatever bits of HMS Java hadn’t burnt down to the bottom of the deep blue sea not much later.

Chesapeake was another of the American heavy frigates that had given Britannia such a case of the hives during the War of 1812, and under Lawrence met the Royal Navy’s Captain Philip Broke of the HMS Shannon shortly after getting underway with a fresh and unworked crew from Boston harbor in the summer of 1813. Lawrence declined the advantages obtaining to the weather gage – including passing up an opportunity to rake her with a broadside from stern to stem – the better to shorten sail and duke it out with Shannon at close quarters, broadside to broadside. No doubt he thought to make short work of the somewhat smaller British frigate.

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex