“Baa! Baa! Baa!”

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 298.

A brasher attempt took place in broad daylight on the adjacent Irresistible. Four Americans, one of them an Indian of the Narragansett tribe, “a man of large stature and remarkable strength,” grabbed the sentry guarding the ship’s jolly boat, which was alongside with all her oars in; threw the sentry into the boat; jumped in after him; and rowed like madmen for the shore, to the uproarious cheers and shouts of encouragement of the prisoners watching from all the hulks in the river. Soon about thirty boats, with 350 British seamen and marines, were in pursuit, firing at the fleeing prisoners. On reaching shore, the fugitives abandoned their hostage and ran flat out for the fields, well ahead of the pursuing marines. But they were quickly surrounded by the local country people, who poured out of the farmhouses and brickyards and recaptured them all but the Indian, who Waterhouse, watching from the deck of the Crown Prince, could see “skipping over the ground like a buck.” But then he too went down, spraining his ankle while leaping a fence.

The attempt clearly had the British rattled, and the Americans gleefully intensified their sarcastic barrages. Some of the prisoners had taken to studying mathematics to fill the time, and now whenever one of their British jailers walked by, one of the American students would look quizzically at his slate and say aloud, as if reciting an arithmetic problem, “If it took 350 British seamen and marines to catch four Yankees, how many British sailors and marines would it take to catch ten thousand of us?” A story got around that the commander of the Crown Prince, a superannuated forty-five-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant named Osmore—who seemed to look upon his duties mainly for the embezzlement opportunities they presented—had poached some sheep from a field nearby for his personal use. A few days later, as Osmore was getting into the boat with his wife and family to head ashore, a raucous chorus of “Baa! Baa! Baa!” suddenly broke forth from all the ship’s ports. Osmore retaliated by barring the boats that called daily to sell the prisoners garden vegetables; the prisoners then appealed to the commodore for a hearing, which gave them a chance to put Osmore completely on the spot by gravely begging him to explain, both to themselves and to his commanding officer, “how such an unmeaning sound could be construed as an insult.” The ban on the market boats was lifted.