The Constitution was only five years old but was literally rotting away at her moorings.

From Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval side of the War of 1812. Page 5.

Preble’s and the Constitution’s mission was to prove them wrong; or at least to prove that the navy had some value at all. Painfully aware how much was riding on their mission, the secretary of the navy confidently let be it known in Washington that Preble would be on station ten weeks from the date of receiving his orders. Instead, the months had slipped by as Preble struggled to get his ship seaworthy. The Constitution was only five years old but was literally rotting away at her moorings. She had served with distinction during America’s undeclared naval war with France from 1798 to 1800—the Quasi War, as it came to be called, triggered by French captures of American merchant ships trading with Britain and then by a wave of popular anger over the XYZ Affair, when an American delegation sent to Paris to resolve the rising tensions was approached by three agents of the French government who demanded a large bribe. In May 1800, a detachment of sailors and marines from the Constitution staged a daring cutting-out raid on a harbor in Haiti, seizing a French privateer and recapturing an American merchant brig; two days later the the Constitution’s men exhibited equal derring-do in snatching another French privateer from under the guns of a nearby port in Hispaniola. But with the signing of a peace treaty between America and France in September 1800, the ship had returned to Boston after one final cruise in the West Indies, and since June 1802 she had lain utterly neglected, accumulating weeds and decay, in the Charles River near Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard.