[Illustration: _Sloops-of-War had 8 to 24 guns on an open deck and were ship-rigged. Fast and versatile—the destroyers of their day—sloops provided escort protection and harassed enemy shipping. Their shallow draft made them useful in coast defense and in lake squadrons._]
[Illustration: _Brigs-of-War had about 20 smaller guns on an open gun deck and carried square sails on two masts. Designed as small, fast cruisers, they served as scouts, blockade runners, commerce raiders, and in anti-piracy and slaveship patrols._]
Then, to worsen an already grim situation, the British warships that had blockaded Boston Harbor for over a year became an immediate threat. A raiding party from the frigate _Nymphe_ rowed into the harbor in the early morning darkness of the 21st and burned a small sloop within a mile of the yard. The next day, with the charred remains of the vessel tied up at a Charlestown wharf, the leader of the raid publicly taunted Bainbridge. In an open letter in the _Boston Patriot_, Bainbridge was warned to better defend his “unfledged Independence.”
On the afternoon of June 22, under the eye of the Guards, the vessel finally slid down the ways into Boston Harbor. The launching was celebrated by a gun salute from _Constitution_ and cheers from a crowd of 20,000. Bainbridge’s friend, the author Washington Irving, couldn’t attend but wrote Bainbridge that he would drink a “potation bottle ... to the success of your first cruise.” In the same spirit Bainbridge entertained with food and drink 300 mechanics and laborers who had, he said, “worked cheap, and done their work most faithfully.”
But the war he wanted so badly to join remained out of Bainbridge’s reach. Desertions, along with financial and outfitting delays, held up the vessel until 1815, by which time peace with England had been concluded.
Another opportunity soon presented itself. The predatory corsairs of the North African Barbary States—Tunisia, Tripolitania, Algeria, and Morocco—had long been a thorn in the side of American merchant shipping. Bainbridge, with _Independence_ as his flagship, won command of a squadron whose mission was to display to the Barbaries the new power of the U.S. Navy. The assignment was particularly attractive to Bainbridge, who earlier in his career had surrendered a ship to the Tripolitans and had another commandeered by the Algerians. But a second squadron under Captain Stephen Decatur beat Bainbridge across the Atlantic and defeated the Algerians in battle. His role was thus reduced to persuading the other Barbaries at gunpoint to end their extortionist ways. The suppression of the Barbary pirates was nevertheless satisfying to Bainbridge. As senior officer, he had the honor of commanding the squadron that initiated a permanent U.S. presence in the Mediterranean—the first of the Navy’s “distant station” squadrons.