I had heard much of the picked crews of American privateers

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 290.

"I had heard much of the picked crews of American privateers,” said Benjamin Browne, similarly surveying the company he found himself among in Boston harbor on the deck of the privateer Grumbler (it was subsequently rechristened with the more seemly name Frolic). They had been recruited by laying out vast quantities of “villainous bad” whiskey, a few dollars’ advance money, “and the free use of that description of rhetoric which the Irish call blarney,” and “such a hatless, shoeless, shirtless, graceless, unwashed, but not unwhipped set of ragamuffins, I believe never before indulged the gregariousness of their natures by congregating together.” Josiah Cobb itemized the crew of the Boston privateer he joined in 1814, as a naive eighteen-year-old dreaming of adventures of the sea, as “Irish, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, African and American … and many who could hail from no quarter on the globe, but whose destination required no conjuring to ascertain.” Just before sailing, a man who had signed on as gunner’s mate came aboard Cobb’s ship and immediately began to storm and swear, saying he had sent his baggage aboard on a boat that morning and now it was nowhere to be found. Cobb innocently offered to help the man search, and they began shifting casks and boxes, inspecting hammocks, moving vast coils of rope, but after a while he began to notice the grins of the rest of the crew, who began offering facetious suggestions—“You haven’t yet searched the bottom under the ballast”; “Have you looked in the captain’s breeches pockets?”—and then one deadpanned, “Had you a suit in your bag with alternate stripes of blue and drab? Because if you had, you need not despair at your loss, for yonder you can get a match,” pointing toward the state prison in Charlestown, which lay in full view nearby. The man went slack-jawed and slunk away, because that was indeed where he had directly come from: he had just been released from seven years in prison and had no possessions at all, and had carried through the elaborate charade about his missing bags in an unsuccessful if imaginative bid to cover up the fact.