British captain Arthur Batt Bingham maintained that the Americans fired first and that although his vessel had suffered heavy casualties he had not at any time surrendered.

[3][4] She then sailed in convoy with the Cruizer-class brig-sloop Calypso to Britain, arriving on 24 October at Woolwich.

[1] The ship's name refers to the Little Belt, a strait between the island of Funen and the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark – a location of great strategic and symbolic importance to Danes.

[1] On 27 September 1810 Wolverine had been in pursuit of a French brig when Rhin joined the chase and after two and a half hours captured the quarry off the Lizard Point.

San Joseph was one year old, about 100 tons burthen (bm), and armed with 14 guns though she was pierced for 16.

[14] On 19 April Rear-Admiral Herbert Sawyer, based at Bermuda, instructed Bingham to meet Captain Pechell in Guerriere, who was cruising somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard between Charlestown and New York City.

If he was unable to make contact with Pechell, Bingham was to cruise along the coast, protecting British ships and intercepting enemy vessels and eventually return to Halifax.

[15] On the morning of 10 May, as Little Belt was some 48 miles east of Cape Charles at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, she sighted a strange sail in the distance.

Bingham made signal #277, which requested the strange ship, if a British warship, to show her number.

Bingham veered three times to foil the American's attempts, while calling for the frigate to identify herself.

The frigate, actually the 44-gun USS President under Commodore John Rodgers had mistaken Little Belt for HMS Guerriere, which had recently been observed impressing an American sailor.

[23] This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.