Sultana's men also made their schooner impossible to ignore. On the 17th, they fired two guns at a brig to make her haul down her pennant. This was not the first time she had demanded this sign of respect. She did it again the next day to a sloop.

Merchant vessels tended to emulate or mimic naval vessels in visible ways, for reasons both of security and prestige. The trend was strong enough that we believe it had a significant effect on technological choice in early modern merchant ships. Painted-on ‘gunports’ and even dummy wooden guns are clear examples of mimicry for security, but the practice goes beyond that; it is likely that the merchant fleet did not adopt the two-masted rigs for mid-size vessels that, by Sultana's time, had become so popular, until the Navy had done so. It was to a merchant ship's advantage for a potential predator to mistake it for a warship from a distance, in an age when maritime warfare was endemic and a major component of that warfare was predation on the enemy's commerce by naval cruisers and privateers. Mimicry for prestige was not separate from mimicry for security; it was at times perhaps a matter of retaining a trait after the security value of that trait had become obsolete. The retention of painted-on gunports – the ‘checkerboard pattern’ – of both British and U.S. merchant ships through the early decades of the nineteenth century is an obvious example.

A less-obvious example is the flying of pennants – long, streaming flags – from the masthead. This was a naval custom, and merchant ships imitated warships when they did this. According to custom and naval regulation, a merchant ship was required to strike, or at least dip, such a pennant when encountering a King's ship, out of respect for the King and acknowledgement of his sovereignty. Given how often Sultana demanded this courtesy by firing her swivel guns, it is clear that the masters of these merchant vessels were in no hurry to make their obeisance to this unusually-small member of His Majesty's Navy.