The following is taken from “Sea Power: A Naval History” (E.B. Potter, ed.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1960). On page 222, the following
appears:

On the seas, the heavy [U.S.] frigate President, under the command of
Captain Stephen Decatur, was captured in mid-January 1815 while trying
to elude the British blockading squadron off New York harbor(10).

(10) U.S. frigate President, taken into the Royal Navy under her
American name, was broken up in 1818. A new President, built on the
exact lines of the old, was launched at Portsmouth, England in 1829.
Later in the century, many Americans and Englishmen, seeing H.M.
frigate President tied up at the West India docks, London, where she
served as a drill-ship for the Royal Navy Reserve, supposed that she
was Decatur’s President. In the late 1890s Admiral Stephen B. Luce
wrote Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt suggesting
that steps be taken to secure the return of the frigate to the United
States. To this proposition Roosevelt replied: “I confess I don’t like
the idea. There is nothing glorious in the history of the President.
She is a fair trophy for the British and she ought to be kept by them.
If I were an Englishman I would not want to have the Macedonian,
Guerriere, or Java in my Navy; and as I am an American I don’t want the
President.”

Subsequently Sir W. Laird Clowes, the eminent British naval
historian, wrote Luce: “I know that many of your countrymen believe
her [the ship at the West India Docks] to be the craft captured in
1815 . . . but there is no truth to this idea, and I am glad that we
do not retain any prize made in that war, which I think is best
forgotten.”

The new President was sold in 1903. Since then three other ships
have successively served as drill-ship at the West India Docks, each
taking the name President.

Quotations from Rear Admiral Albert Cleaves USN, Life and Letters of
Rear Admiral Stephen. B. Luce, U.S. Navy (New York and London, 1925),
285.

The question I pose is: If the West India Docks still exist, is there a
drill ship stationed there for the Royal Navy which retains the name
President? Just curious. Thanks in advance, Ed.

Edward Wittenberg
ewitten507@aol.com