The year 1813 had begun gloriously off the coast of Brazil for New Jersey’s two great naval heroes of the second war of independence. Thirty-nine-year-old William Bainbridge of Princeton, in command of the USS Constitution, had just won a crushing victory over the British frigate Java and was sailing back to Boston with the news. Thirty-one-year-old James Lawrence of Burlington, in command of the sloop of war Hornet, remained behind. Naval historian John R.