There had been no want of courage but there was a want of skill

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 218.

The same day’s mail from New York brought news of the return of James Lawrence in the sloop of war Hornet from his cruise along the coast of South America. On January 24, 1813, the Hornet had been chased off the blockade of the Bonne Citoyenne at São Salvador by the arrival of a British seventy-four, but Lawrence had nimbly slipped away from the much more powerful enemy and stood out to sea. On February 4 he captured an English brig carrying $23,000 in specie. And then on February 24, nearing the mouth of the Demerara River, the Hornet fell in with the sixteen-gun British brig sloop Peacock and in fourteen minutes left her a sinking wreck, her captain dead along with thirty-seven other casualties to the Hornet’s three. The Peacock had been long known as “the yacht” for her resplendent appearance and immaculately polished fittings, and the accuracy of her crew’s gunnery in the brief fight had been abysmal. Although a subsequent British court-martial ran true to form in underscoring that there had been no want of courage displayed by the Peacock’s officers and men, and “honorably acquitted” the survivors, the court frankly attributed her defeat to a “want of skill in directing the Fire, owing to an omission of the Practice of exercising the crew in the use of the Guns for the last three Years.” It was the fifth American victory in a single-ship engagement. Joshua Keene, the Peacock’s steward, kept a small notebook of clippings he saved while a prisoner in New York, and one included the words of a chantey that Keene noted was making the rounds “about the Streets of New York”:

Yankee sailors have a knack
Haul away! yeo ho, boys
Of pulling down a British Jack
’Gainst any odds you know boys.