During this period of litigation the privateer hero had, of course, revisited St. Malo and seen his family and friends; and there he also fell in love with Mlle. Marie Blaize, to whom he became engaged. But the sea was calling him again, and he left her without being married.
His new command was the _Clarisse_, 14 guns, with a crew of one hundred and forty hardy seamen of St. Malo and elsewhere; while Nicolas Surcouf, brother to the captain, and a man of similar type, was chief officer. She sailed in July 1798 for the old familiar cruising-ground in the Indian Ocean; and just after crossing the Equator, fell in with a large armed English vessel, from which, after a sharp action, she parted, considerably damaged; but Surcouf consoled himself for this failure--from which, as his biographer puts it, "there remained only the glory of having seen the flag of England flying before the victorious standard of France!"--by the capture of a rich prize off Rio Janeiro; and anchored in December 1798 at Port Louis, Mauritius, "where his expected return from Europe was awaited with impatience by those who had built great hopes upon the conqueror of the _Triton_."
Space does not admit of following the adventures of Robert Surcouf in detail; his grand-nephew spares no pains, indeed, in this respect, spinning out his narrative, embellished with admiring outbursts of national and personal eulogy, in a somewhat tedious fashion. In the _Clarisse_ Surcouf had more successes, capturing two armed merchant vessels very cleverly at Sonson, in Sumatra, not without damage, which rendered it advisable to return to Port Louis to refit: thence, putting out again, he was on one occasion chased by the English frigate _Sibylle_; and so hard pressed was he that he was compelled to have recourse to desperate measures to improve the speed of his vessel: eight guns were thrown overboard, together with spare spars and other loose material, the rigging was eased up, the mast wedges loosened, the between-deck supports knocked away. It was a light breeze, of course, and these measures have a remarkable effect under such circumstances, rendering the vessel "all alive," as it were, and exceedingly susceptible of the smallest variation of pressure on the sails--and so the _Clarisse_ escaped. Two days later she captured an English vessel, the _Jane_--which is misnamed _James_ in French narratives--whose skipper wrote a long account of the affair. She sailed in company with two Indiamen, the _Manship_ and _Lansdowne_, having been warned that Surcouf was on the prowl outside. The captain imagined that, by keeping company with the two large Indiamen--armed vessels, of course--he would be safe from molestation; but he was sorely mistaken, for when the privateer hove in sight, and he signalled his consorts, they calmly sailed on and left the _Jane_ a victim, after a trifling resistance. Surcouf, being informed that these two large vessels, still in sight, were Indiamen, contemptuously remarked: "They are two _Tritons_," and he and his officers expressed the opinion that the captains deserved to be shot.