At this the bar-shot and scrap-iron from the Yankee began to tell on the British head-gear. Jib after jib was cut away, while the sails of the foremast were torn to shreds. The pressure on the after-sails threw her stern down away from the wind and her bow up into it. Then her sails caught aback and the Peacock ran across her stern and fired a few guns to rake her, though because of the headway of the Peacock only a few were fired. A moment later the maintopmast of the British ship fell with a crash, and her main-boom was cut in two and fell on the wheel, so that she was for the time helpless.
The Peacock and the Epervier.
From a wood-cut in the “Naval Monument.”
At that Warrington hauled the Peacock close under the port quarter of the Epervier and opened a deadly fire of solid shot directed chiefly at the enemy’s water-line—the favorite target of the Yankee gunners. One easily pictures the scene at this time as the Yankee crews, stripped to the waist, in the warm summer air, worked like white devils in the sulphurous smoke over their guns. They waved their arms and cheered as they saw the shot knock the splinters low down on the black-painted hull of the half-obscured enemy that was now adrift, unable to turn either to port or starboard. But some of them aimed high enough to dismount every gun on the port side of the Epervier, which faced the Yankee.
Meantime, the Epervier had been gathering stern way and was drifting on board the Peacock. Allen says Captain Wales thought to wear the Epervier in order to run on board the Peacock, but this is absurd, because she was aback.
On seeing that the Epervier was likely to fall aboard the Peacock, Captain Wales called his men aft, intending to make a last brave effort by boarding. But, as James says, “the British crew declined a measure so fraught with danger.” Allen says: “A large proportion of the crew evinced a great distaste for the measure.” So Captain Wales hauled down his flag at 11 o’clock. The action had lasted forty-five minutes.
Captain Wales showed conspicuous bravery and ability, and his chief officer, Lieutenant John Hackett, ably seconded him. In fact, Hackett had his left arm shattered and was dangerously wounded in the hip by a splinter, “but it was with difficulty that this gallant officer could be persuaded” to leave the deck.
That the crew should have flinched is not a matter of wonder. The British sailors had been accustomed to go at the Frenchmen “hammer and tongs,” and “whoop and hurrah.” It was a lark to meet a Latin-blood crew. But in 1812 they had a new kind of an enemy to face. It should be remembered that, after they had “seen the countenance” of this enemy for a few months, even the British Admiralty flinched, for James says, on page 402 of Volume VI., that “the Admiralty had issued an order that no eighteen-pounder frigate was voluntarily to engage one of the twenty-four-pounder frigates of America.”
This is a slight digression from the story of the Peacock-Epervier fight, but it seems worth the making because it offers an explanation of the rancor and the deliberate falsehoods of the British writers when referring to British naval contests with Yankees. A knowledge of the whole truth about the prowess of American naval seamen had had a disturbing influence on the minds of the British sailors on more than one occasion, and the records of the sea-fights with the Yankees were deliberately falsified in order to preserve the self-confidence of British Jack.