Edward Preble, made two cruises to the West Indies and captured ten prizes. Preble turned command of Pickering over to Benjamin Hillar, who captured the much larger and more heavily armed French privateer lEgypte Conquise after a nine-hour battle. In September 1800, Hillar, Pickering, and her entire crew were lost at sea in a storm. Preble next commanded the frigate , which he sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific to protect U.S. merchantmen in the East Indies. He recaptured several U.S. ships that had been seized by French privateers. For various reasons, the role of the Royal Navy was minimised both at the time and later; the first significant study of the war by US naval historian Gardner W. Allen in 1909 focused exclusively on ship-to-ship actions, and this is how the war is often remembered. However, historian Michael Palmer argues American naval operations cannot be understood in isolation and when operating in the Caribbean Significant naval actions From the perspective of the US Navy, the Quasi-War consisted of a series of ship-to-ship actions in US coastal waters and the Caribbean; one of the first was the Capture of La Croyable on 7 July 1798 by the outside Egg Harbor, New Jersey. On 20 November, a pair of French frigates, Insurgente and Volontaire, captured the schooner , commanded by Lieutenant William Bainbridge; Retaliation would be recaptured on 28 June 1799. On 9 February 1799, the frigate captured the French Navy's frigate L'Insurgente. By 1 July, under the command of Stephen Decatur, had been refitted and repaired and embarked on its mission to patrol the South Atlantic coast and West Indies in search of French ships which were preying on American merchant vessels. On 1 January 1800, a convoy of American merchant ships and their escort, United States naval schooner , engaged a squadron of armed barges manned by French-allied Haitians known as picaroons off the coast of present-day Haiti. On 1 February, the American frigate severely damaged but did not capture the French frigate La Vengeance off the coast of Saint Kitts. In early May, Captain Silas Talbot organized a naval expedition to Puerto Plata on the island of Hispaniola in order to harass French shipping, capturing the Spanish coastal fort at Puerto Plata and a French corvette. Following the French invasion of Curaçao in July, the American sloops and began a blockade of the island in September that