Note.—The accounts of the manœuvres differ widely, but it is agreed that the real fighting began at 6 o’clock with the Constitution on the port quarter of the enemy. When fairly abeam, the mizzen-mast of the Guerrière fell over to port, according to Allen, and dragged her nose up to the starboard side of the Constitution; when the Constitution drove clear the two remaining masts of the Guerrière fell. The Constitution after repairs to her rigging, returned at 7 o’clock.
As the men on the Constitution ran to extinguish this fire Captain Dacres on the Guerrière called away boarders, intending to climb along his bowsprit to reach the Constitution’s quarter-deck, but when he saw the men on the Constitution ready to receive him he thought differently about it. The Yankees then thought to board, and brave Lieutenant Bush, of the marines, jumped on the rail for the honor of leading the way, and there was shot dead by a British marine. For a few moments the two ships hung together, sawing up and down, while the bulk of each crew was massed for boarding and the topmen on each ship poured a galling fire into the other. Lieutenant Morris was shot through the body and Master Alwyn was but little less severely wounded. Captain Hull climbed part way upon the rail, but a big Yankee seaman dragged him back unceremoniously, and begged him not to do that unless he first took “off them swabs”—pointing to the captain’s gold epaulets. A sailor who fired a pistol at one of the enemy and missed him, threw the pistol with better, though not fatal, aim. He hit the fellow in the breast. And then the flag at the Constitution’s mizzen-truck was shot down. The enemy cheered, but John Hogan shinned up and replaced it, although a number of British marines fired at him steadily all the time he was exposed.
At last the larger spread of canvas on the Constitution pulled her clear, and then, as she began to swing around into position to open fire again, both the main and the foremast of the Guerrière that had been badly cut by the American shot went over the rail with a crash, and there she lay a helpless hulk.
It was then exactly 6.23 o’clock, or about two hours since the firing of the first gun from the Guerrière. But from the time that the Constitution fired her first broadside, it was less than thirty minutes.
Action between the Constitution and the Guerrière.—IV.
From the painting by Birch, at the Naval Academy, Annapolis.
Veering off for a brief interval, the Constitution’s crew made hasty repairs to the rigging, and then came back with guns loaded. They found the Guerrière in the trough of the sea rolling her main-deck guns under water with every passing swell.
The Constitution had been at her less than thirty minutes, but all three of her masts had been shot away, and were dragging over the rail by such of the shrouds as had not been cut by the shot of the Yankees. Her hull was knocked into a sieve by the Yankee round-shot. Thirty of these projectiles had penetrated her more than four feet below the water-line. The cool Yankee gunner had watched her rolling her side out of water and then aimed his gun at the copper below the water-line. Out of a crew of two hundred and seventy-two, twenty-three men were dead or mortally hurt, and fifty-six were more or less severely wounded—more than one-fourth of her crew had been hit in that brief time. On the Constitution seven men had been killed and seven wounded, while her hull had scarcely been touched below the bulwarks.