Combat· Quasi-War with France
Experiment vs Deux Amis
The schooner USS Experiment, under Lieutenant Charles Stewart, captured the French privateer Deux Amis off Barbuda in the West Indies after an engagement of only ten minutes.
The privateer's captain seems to have taken the Experiment for a harmless merchantman and let her come within range, at which point the Experiment opened so effective a fire that the privateer quickly surrendered. The ship's Marines supported the action in their usual shipboard role, and no Americans were lost. It was a clean, brief capture during the Experiment's productive 1800 cruise, the same cruise that, later that month, would bring in the French naval schooner Diane off the islands, and with her the notorious Haitian general André Rigaud, whose picaroons and barges had harried American shipping in Saint-Domingue's waters all year.
Podcast episodes on Quasi-War with France
Record no. 186