This duel, however, differed from those fought on land by two gentlemen armed with pistols. It was being fought by six hundred men and boys at the muzzles of sixty-four cannon on the waters of the Atlantic, six miles southeast of Sandy Hook. It was the morning of August 1, 1793, and excited New Yorkers lined the decks of nine chartered excursion boats to watch Jean-Baptiste Bompard, captain of the French Republic’s frigate Embuscade (“Ambush”), take up the gauntlet thrown down by Captain William Augustus Courtney of His Majesty’s frigate Boston. Four days earlier, Courtney, cruising off the Narrows near New York harbor, had asked an American go-between to carry a challenge to Wall Street’s Tontine Coffee House, crossroads of Manhattan’s maritime traffic: “Tell Captain Bompard that I have come all the way from Halifax, on purpose to take the Embuscade , and I shall be very happy to see her out this way.” By July 31, Bompard had posted his reply in the Coffee House, for all to see: “Citizen Bompard will wait on Captain Courtney tomorrow, agreeably to invitation; he hopes to find him at the Hook.”1The Embuscade sailed forth from its anchorage on the lower Manhattan waterfront to defend the honor of the French Republic and the Revolution that had given it birth, and to defy the English foe the Republic had been fighting on the high seas for six months.
