You choose to lament losses or to solve problems

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 190. With some of the early defeats in the war, the British establishment and public sought excuses for the unthinkable.

Although the “disguised ship of the line” charge would become an enduring part of British lore of the war, in fact a British seventy-four threw a broadside with twice the weight of metal of even the large American frigates. Even some in England mocked that face-saving excuse at the time. William Cobbett, an English journalist who began his career as a fire-eating Tory, spent several years in the United States in the 1790s propagandizing for Britain, and in the early 1800s called for an unremitting stance against American maritime pretentions, had since done a complete about-face and become a thoroughgoing radical and supporter of America; just a few months after his release in June 1812 from a two-year sentence in Newgate Prison for treasonous libel, he published in his Cobbett’s Political Register some sarcastic doggerel in response to the shilly-shallying excuses being offered for the British naval setbacks:

For when Carden the ship of the Yankee Decatur
Attacked, without doubting to take her or beat her,
A FRIGATE she seemed to his glass and his eyes:
But when taken himself, how great his surprise
To find her a SEVENTY-FOUR IN DISGUISE!

If Jonathan thus has the art of disguising,
That he captures our ships is by no means surprising:
And it can’t be disgraceful to strike to an elf
Who is more than a match for the devil himself—

Once the initial shock began to wear off, a number of more thoughtful correspondents to the Naval Chronicle began to assess the situation more objectively, suggesting in effect that it might be more productive to figure out how the British navy could start winning again rather than invest so much energy defending its losses as honorable ones. To be sure, defending British courage and honor was not merely a matter of national pride: much of Britain’s real deterrent power upon the seas rested on its captains’ undimmed reputation for courage. Yet it was clear to more than a few navy men that it was time to worry less about honor and more about practicalities. “It is not in our national character to despond, let us rather endeavour to trace the evil, that a remedy may be found,” wrote “A Half-Pay Officer,” who wondered whether the Americans had different equipment for their guns that enabled them to “have astonished us, not merely by taking our ships … but by taking them with such little comparative loss, and in so short a time.”11 Several noted the decisive advantage of the longer-range twenty-four-pounder guns employed by the American ships and recommended that British frigates needed to emulate this innovation.