“I have no more officers to give you. You must try to make out by yourself.”
PERRY’S VICTORY.
Positions at Height of Battle.
The ships were probably in about this position when Terry, on finding the Lawrence wrecked and the Niagara coming up with a fresh breeze on the dotted line, determined to shift his flag. The whole fleet then drove away to the northwest, and Perry, with the Niagara, ran through the British line, tangled it up and cut it to pieces. He was aided by the other American vessels, who doubled up on the British line, the Caledonia, Ariel, and Scorpion gallantly following the Niagara through the line, while the others came up to windward of it. It was this movement that Ward pronounces “most masterly.”
Going forward, Yarnall did make out by himself. He aimed the guns with his own hands and eyes thereafter. The time had come when Perry, too, like John Paul Jones of old, found it necessary to work the guns.
The last of Perry’s assistants, the gallant Brooks, “remarkable for his personal beauty,” was struck in the hip by a round shot and knocked across the deck, where he begged, in his agony, that Perry would shoot him. But Perry turned away to fight the guns from which Brooks had been shot to death.
On the lower deck the scene was soon worse than on the gun-deck, for more than half the crew had been carried there. Surgeon Parsons could not work fast enough. The wounded were stretched out everywhere awaiting their turn. And because the ship was of such shoal draft the cannon balls of the enemy came crashing in among the wounded. Midshipman Laub, with a tourniquet on his arm, had started to go on deck again when a cannon-ball struck him in the chest and scattered his remains across the deck and splashing against the opposite side of the ship. An Indian, Charles Poughigh, was killed by another ball as he lay on deck after having had his leg cut off. The wounded, who were suffering the tortures of the surgeon’s knife, were tortured anew by splinters ripped from the ship’s side by the merciless shot, while a scared dog mingled its mournful howls with the crash and roar of battle and the shrieks and groans of the dying.
Second View of Perry’s Victory.