“I can’t hear what you say,” replied Jones, wishing to get nearer before opening fire. For a moment the ships drifted on in silence as before, and then the voice was heard once more through the night:
“What ship is that? Answer, or I shall be under the necessity of firing into you.”
Instead of answering the hail, Captain Jones in a low voice passed the word to fire, and the next instant the spurting flames from the American guns were answered, as it were, in the same breath by those of the British, and the night battle was begun. It was then exactly seven o’clock.
At the first fire two of the three eighteen-pounders in the lower-deck broadside of the Bonhomme Richard burst. “We could see that as we sighted for our next broadside, because we could see how they hove up the gun-deck above them,” wrote Capt. Francis Heddart, who was a midshipman on the Serapis during the fight. And the midshipman and his men noted with glee that thereafter none of these, the heaviest guns on the Yankee’s ship, was fired. The crews of the two guns that burst were all either killed or seriously wounded, and the men on that deck were called up to the main deck to help work the guns there. And most remarkable results followed on this move.
The Engagement between the Bonhomme Richard and Serapis.
From an engraving by Hamilton of a drawing by Collier.
The Serapis had entered the fight close-hauled on the port tack and to leeward. The Bonhomme Richard, running free, sailed across the enemy’s bow and then came to the wind, while the enemy veered off a little, and thereafter for one hour the two ships drifted side by side, drawing slowly nearer to each other, while the men, with desperate energy, worked their guns. But there was a vast difference in the guns. “We had ten eighteen-pounders in each battery below,” wrote an officer of the Serapis afterward. “I do not see why any shot should have failed.”
And no shot of that battery did fail during the first hour, and when they failed later it was because they had shot the six ports of the Bonhomme Richard into one huge chasm, not only on the side of her next to them, but on the further side as well, so that when they fired some of the battery the balls passed clear and fell into the sea beyond. There was not a splinter of the American ship left in front of them. They had not only cut away the walls of the Bonhomme Richard; they had practically cleared her lower gundeck. There was no one left there save only a few marines that guarded the line of boys passing cartridges from the magazine up to the guns on the upper deck.
Nor was that the worst effect the English fire had had upon the Bonhomme Richard. Taking advantage of the rolling of the vessels in the long gentle swell, the English had been able to send a half dozen of their eighteen-pound shot into the Bonhomme Richard below the water-line, and she was “leaking like a basket.”