It was in this happy frame of mind that, on January 5th, Roger left Stockholm with Mary. It was just a year since he had arrived there on his secret mission to the Crown Prince. But his status was now very different. He had come there in his role of Colonel Comte de Breuc, giving out that he had recently escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in England. To make his story credible he had had with him only the clothes he stood up in, and travelled the two hundred and fifty miles from Gothenburg to Stockholm in a stuffy diligence. Now he left with a charming wife and an ample wardrobe, as Britain's unofficial Ambassador and the honoured friend of the Crown Prince, who had placed one of the Royal sledges at their disposal.
With frequent relays of horses, the drive along the well-kept highway, the snow on which was regularly cleared into lofty banks on either side, naturally made the journey much quicker, so they arrived in Gothenburg on the 7th. There were several American traders in the harbour. Learning that one, the Cape Cod, was due to sail for Hull in two days' time, Roger went aboard to interview her master, Captain Absolom.
He proved to be a stocky, fair-haired New Englander, abrupt of speech but not discourteous, and readily agreed a price to take Roger and Mary across the North Sea.
Roger was much relieved at this, as he had needed no telling about the cause of the war, since the Americans had been threatening hostilities for several years past, and he feared that he might meet with a certain amount of hostility.
The trouble arose from what was known as the British 'Navigation System'. This had been initiated as far back as Stuart times, the policy on which the System was based being that, as Britain was vulnerable to invasion only from the sea, her shipping must greatly exceed that of any other nation—not for commercial reasons, but so that, in the event of war, great numbers of seamen should be available for drafting into the Royal Navy.
As a result of this policy Britain had secured the great bulk of the carrying trade of the world. As far back as 1728, of the four thousand two hundred-odd ships arriving in her principal ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol, fewer than four hundred and forty had been under foreign flags; and in 1792, when the present war against France had started, there were eighty thousand trained seamen in British ships. By lowering the percentage of Britons legally required to serve in merchant ships to one in four, fifty thousand more had become available to man warships.
Another principle of British maritime policy was that it was forbidden to import any goods into her Colonies except in British-built ships. And even when, after the war in the 1770s, the United States had gained their independence, British control over their shipping had remained indistinguishable in practice from what it had been in Colonial days.
However, the Americans being mainly of British stock, large numbers of them had the sea in their blood. Moreover, they had better timber for building ships than even that to be procured in England. In the forty years following Independence, this had resulted in their creating a merchant marine second in size only to that of Britain.
Between 1792 and 1805 this had proved to the advantage of both Britain and France, as both countries had had to reduce their merchant fleets in order to increase their navies, and American merchantmen had filled the gap by carrying much-needed supplies, mostly from the Caribbean. It had also, of course, greatly increased the wealth of the United States.
The first cause for complaint by the United States had arisen in May 1805 when, in the test case of the ship Essex, it had been ruled by a British Court that American ships should not be allowed to carry goods from the West Indies to a country at war with Britain, unless they had been 'neutralised' by first landing their cargo in a United Kingdom port—and unloading, warehousing and reloading caused most annoying delays and loss of profit to American merchants.
But the real trouble was started by Napoleon's Berlin Decree of 1806, reinforced by his Decree of Milan in 1807, whereby he established his Continental System, the object of which was to ruin British commerce by closing to British goods the ports of all the countries he controlled. That did not seriously affect the Americans, but what followed did.
In retaliation, in the winter of 1806-1807, the British issued Orders in Council, decreeing a blockade of the ports of France and her allies and forbidding neutral vessels to enter such ports unless they had first called at British ports and paid British dues on their cargo.
As the United States could not conform to both the French and British decrees, their ships henceforth risked confiscation by one or the other; but, having no Navy capable of protecting their shipping, all they could do was angrily to declare the decrees of both countries contrary to International Law.
Another matter to which the Americans took extreme umbrage was the treatment of the seamen in their ships by the Royal Navy. A high proportion of the men in the Navy were normally fishermen and others from the seaport towns who had been seized by the press gangs and forced to serve in warships. Understandably, many of them deeply resented this, and took the first opportunity to desert in neutral ports or those of the West Indies. To earn a living, they then signed on as seamen in American traders. As a means of countering this very serious drain on naval manpower, the Admiralty had issued orders that His Majesty's ships encountering United States merchantmen at sea should halt, board them, have their crews paraded and take off any men of British nationality.
To carry out this order justly proved no easy matter, for on reaching America, many deserters had secured forged papers, alleging them to be United States citizens. On close questioning by British Captains it frequently emerged that the men concerned were really British. But, in numerous cases, men who were in fact Americans had been called liars and taken off to serve in British warships. Of the six thousand two hundred and fifty-seven men so removed from United States ships, between 1801 and 1812, it cannot be doubted that at least several hundreds had been illegally impressed, and this had led to ever-increasing antagonism to Britain. The practice had aroused a crisis of indignation when, in June 1807, the British frigate Leopard had actually fired on the American frigate Chesapeake, forced her to surrender and removed four of her sailors.
But from 1801 to 1809 Thomas Jefferson, who had played a leading part in securing American Independence, had been President of the United States, and he was a man of peace. He was strongly opposed to further federalization of the States of the Union, so was averse to forming a national Army and Navy, and was determined at alt costs to preserve neutrality. In consequence, the only action Jefferson took was to instruct Monroe, then United States Ambassador in London, to inform the British Government that all British armed vessels in United States ports were to be recalled at once and would in future be prohibited from entering them.
In 1809, James Madison—another founding-father of the Republic, and responsible more than any other man for the framing of the Constitution—had succeeded Jefferson as President. Unlike his predecessor, Madison was a strong Federalist but, even so, he did little to unite or increase the Militia of the several states or to strengthen their Naval forces. In fact in January 1812 a Bill put forward in favour of declaring war on Britain, for the provision of more frigates and the creation of a dockyard, was actually defeated.
In May 1812, the British Prime Minister, Perceval, was assassinated, and succeeded by Lord Liverpool Castlereagh. remained Foreign Secretary and continued his, policy of politely ignoring American complaints, as neither he nor his colleagues could believe that the United States would go to the length of declaring war and that, even if they did, the five thousand or so troops stationed in Canada would be amply sufficient to protect that country from invasion.