of fear would have lost him. But Surcouf was quite equal to the occasion. He steadily pursued his course, unquestioned and unmolested, his true character unsuspected, and he soon sailed out of sight. A few days later he captured a Portuguese vessel, the Oriente, and a fine ship under Arab colours, but whose papers attested her to be English property. Both these vessels were likewise despatched to the islands.[1] His crew being reduced to seventy men, and he having received intelligence that a new English frigate had arrived with the express mission to capture him, Surcouf resolved to follow his prizes thither. Chased, though ineffectually, by an English man-of-war, he arrived at Port St. Louis on the 31st January 1808, and found that all his prizes had safely preceded him.
Surcouf shortly afterward set out for France in a vessel called the Charles[2] with a cargo valued at five millions of francs. His vessel, the Revenant,[3] after a short cruise under her first lieutenant, Potier, had been
- ↑ Thither also had been despatched all the captures not specially referred to in the text, except the Admiral Aplin, shipwrecked on the Coromandel coast, the Hunter, which he abandoned, and the Success, which he burned.
- ↑ The Charles was an old frigate called La Semillante, worn out in service, and sold for the purposes of commerce.
- ↑ The fate of the Revenant was curious. After a short cruise under the command of Potier, in which she captured a Portuguese frigate, the Conceção de San Antonio, pierced for 64, and carrying 54 guns, she was taken up by the Governor, added to the French Navy as a corvette of 22 guns, and re-named the Jena. In this new form she sailed with an envoy and despatches for the Persian Gulf, captured the schooner Swallow with 2500 dollars on board her, and the Janet, a small country
