It was most unfortunate that while Foster was on his way to the United States, British cruisers would have renewed the blockade of New York. Two frigates, the Melampus and the Guerriere, lay off Sandy Hook and resumed the old irritating practice of holding up American vessels and searching them for deserters. In the existing state of American feeling, with the Chesapeake outrage still unredressed, the behavior of the British commanders was as perilous as walking through a powder magazine with a live coal. The American navy had suffered severely from Jefferson's "chaste reformation" but it had not lost its fighting spirit. Officers who had served in the war with Tripoli prayed for a fair chance to avenge the Chesapeake; and the Secretary of the Navy had abetted this spirit in his orders to Commodore John Rodgers, who was patrolling the coast with a squadron of frigates and sloops. "What has been perpetrated," Rodgers was warned, "may be again attempted. It is therefore our duty to be prepared and determined at every hazard to vindicate the injured honor of our navy, and revive the drooping spirit of the nation."
Under the circumstances it would have been little short of a miracle if an explosion had not occurred; yet for a year Rodgers sailed up and down the coast without encountering the British frigates. On May 16, 1811, however, Rodgers in his frigate, the President, sighted a suspicious vessel some fifty miles off Cape Henry. From her general appearance he judged her to be a man-of-war and probably the Guerriere. He decided to approach her, he relates, in order to ascertain whether a certain seaman alleged to have been impressed was aboard; but the vessel made off and he gave chase. By dusk the two ships were abreast. Exactly what then happened will probably never be known, but all accounts agree that a shot was fired and that a general engagement followed. Within fifteen minutes the strange vessel was disabled and lay helpless under the guns of the President, with nine of her crew dead and twenty-three wounded. Then, to his intense disappointment, Rodgers learned that his adversary was not the Guerriere but the British sloop of war Little Belt, a craft greatly inferior to his own.