About the middle of the afternoon the "Shannon" hove to, to await the coming of the "Chesapeake." The latter, having already cleared for action, presently took in her top-gallant sails and royals, and hauled the courses up, and a little before six o'clock shot up alongside of the enemy. In an instant the battle has begun in all its fury. Lawrence if he desires can pass under the "Shannon's" stern and rake her, but he is confident of success, and scorns his advantage. So he turns, and pressing close along the enemy's side, receives the fire of each gun as it is brought to bear. Half the "Shannon's" cannon have been loaded with kegs of musket-balls, and at the short range these make terrible havoc, and as mischance will have it, above all among the officers. At the first fire White the sailing-master is killed, and Lawrence is wounded, but he does not leave the deck. The guns of the "Chesapeake" reply, but the raw crew are not equal to such work as is required of them in opposing Broke's well-trained gunners. Presently the helmsman is shot down, and the ship, coming up in the wind, loses headway and falls off with her stern and quarter exposed to a raking fire. The enemy makes the most of this; broadside after broadside comes pouring in, smashing in the after-ports of the "Chesapeake," and killing the men at the guns or driving them away. The slaughter among the officers goes on; the third lieutenant is killed, then the marine officer and the boatswain. A moment later and the ships are foul, the "Shannon's" anchor hooking in the quarter-port of her antagonist. The withering fire of the enemy continues,—the heavy round shot, followed, now that the ships have closed, by the rain of grape and musket-balls. Ludlow, the first lieutenant, the captain's main reliance, is twice wounded and falls; and last of all the gallant Lawrence himself, who until now has kept his post, though weak from loss of blood, receives his mortal wound and is carried below, exclaiming as he leaves the deck, "Don't give up the ship!"
It was of no use now,—this last injunction,—for there was none to heed it. The quarter-deck had been stripped of all its officers except the midshipmen, who after all were only boys, and three of whom have fallen. Lawrence, before he is carried off, orders the boarders to be summoned, but the frightened bugler cannot sound the call. The captain's aides were sent below to pass the word, but the gun's crews on the main-deck, in the confusion, fail to understand the order. On the upper deck the men, uncertain, without a leader, are flinching from their guns. Broke, from his forecastle, sees that the Americans are weakening, and calls away the men to board. His boatswain, a veteran of Rodney's fleet, lashes the ships together, and in an instant twenty of the crew, led by their captain, have leaped the rail and gained the "Chesapeake's" quarter-deck. The deck is piled with bodies, but there is no one here to make resistance. On the forecastle are gathered a fragment of the frightened crew, and against these the enemy now advances. They are in no condition to resist: a few struggle to reach the hatchway; others climb over the bow; the rest throw down their arms and call for quarter.
For a moment there is now a pause, but presently some of the men below make a rush for the deck, and the fight begins anew. It is a scene of wild confusion. The enemy is now crowding on board,—officers, marines, blue-jackets; there seems no end to their numbers. The "Chesapeake's" topmen, who as yet have taken no part in the struggle, now pick the boarders off with small arms, but they are soon driven from their stations. The two remaining lieutenants, Budd and Cox, who have meantime come up from the deck below, are both wounded. The gallant Ludlow, striving, mortally wounded as he is, to drag himself up the ladder, is cut down as he reaches the hatchway. The chaplain, Livermore, seizes a pistol and fires without effect at Broke, who in return makes one furious cut with his sword, nearly dividing his assailant's arm. The "Shannon's" first lieutenant hauls down the flag and bends an English ensign; but in the hurry he hoists it with the old colors still above, and the guns' crews, whom he has left on board his ship, suppose from this that the boarders have been defeated. So they open again, and kill their own lieutenant and several of his men. Captain Broke, urging his boarders on, is half stunned by a blow from the musket of a marine, who clubs with his gun since he cannot fire; and a sailor, following the marine, cuts down the captain, only to be himself cut down by one of the enemy. A few minutes of desperate hand-to-hand conflict with pike and pistol and cutlass, and the Americans on deck are overpowered and yield. The crew below, not daring to come up, are still making a show of resistance; but a few shots fired down the hatchway put an end to the struggle, and the "Chesapeake" is in the hands of the enemy.
In this wonderful action, which from beginning to end lasted only fifteen minutes, the "Chesapeake," out of twenty officers, lost seventeen in killed and wounded. Even had this worst of all disasters not befallen her, she might perhaps have still been captured, for as we know her crew were not prepared to fight, having had no training. But had not Lawrence and Ludlow both fallen at the critical moment when the two ships fouled, it is certain that one or the other of them would have prolonged the contest, and that the enemy's loss, large as it was, would have been larger yet. The two ships were carried into Halifax with their wounded captains still on board, but Lawrence died before he reached the shore. Captain Broke, whose wounds were not so serious, recovered, and was made a baronet for his victory, which, as neither friend nor enemy could deny, had been gallantly and bravely won. Of the officers engaged on one side or the other in that eventful battle, many were killed or died of their wounds, and nearly all who survived the fight have long since been gathered to their fathers; but it is a strange fact that the highest officer in Her Majesty's Navy to-day, the senior Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Provo Wallis, was the lieutenant who took the "Shannon" into Halifax after her bloody victory three quarters of a century ago.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE CRUISE OF THE "ESSEX."
Of the vessels in commission at the opening of the war, a fine frigate of the third class was the "Essex," very fast, but poorly armed with carronades. She had been for some months under the command of Captain Porter, of whom we have heard in the war with France, and whose life had already been so full of active service, that though only two-and-thirty years of age, we think of him as a much older man.
The "Essex" had first got to sea for a war-cruise on the 3d of August, and soon after, on a hazy night, she came up with a fleet of the enemy's transports sailing under the convoy of a frigate. Stealing up silently alongside the rearmost transport, Porter ordered her to draw out of the convoy on pain of being fired into. This order the transport hastened to obey; and the convoying ship, fearing that by delay she might lose all her convoy, went on her way without molesting the captor. The transport had one hundred and fifty troops on board; and Porter, putting all the prisoners on their parole, ransomed the prize and left her to make her own way into port.