At that the long guns of the whole American squadron began to talk. The British sloop Chubb and the British brig Linnet had now arrived near the Yankee brig Eagle, and the British frigate Confiance was soon abreast of the American Saratoga. The Chubb strove to take a position for raking the Yankee Eagle, but the Eagle was swung to give her one broadside and that was enough. Wholly disabled, she drifted down wind along the American line. More than half of her crew were killed and wounded, and one shot more having been fired into her as she approached the Saratoga, she hauled down her flag, when midshipman Charles F. Pratt boarded her and took her over toward Plattsburg, clear of the line of battle. But five of her crew were able to stand up when she arrived.
But before this was done the British Captain Downie had brought his flagship to anchor abreast of the Yankee flagship Saratoga at a distance of three hundred or four hundred yards. Not a shot had been fired so far from this ship, but when she had been moored with a spring to her cable, and her guns had been carefully aimed the sixteen long twenty-fours, double shotted, were discharged as one. Every shot struck the Yankee flagship, and that was the most frightful blast received by any Yankee ship in all this war. The Saratoga reeled and shivered as the iron ploughed through her planks and timbers. More than one hundred men were thrown to the deck by the shock, and forty of them failed to get up, for they were killed or wounded, First Lieutenant Peter Gamble being among the slain.
The Battle of Plattsburg.
From an old wood-cut.
This was done not far from 9 o’clock, and from that time on the Yankee Saratoga and the Eagle were the targets for the British Confiance and Linnet that together carried a weight of long gun metal exactly equal to that of the whole American squadron. It was a terribly unequal fight. There were eight long twelves and sixteen long twenty-fours driving their solid shot into the two Yankees that could reply with only four long twenty-fours and four long eighteens. And the British flagship threw some red-hot shot.
Because some of the long twenty-fours on the British Confiance were after the first broadside turned toward the Yankee Eagle, which already was in a fierce fight with the British Linnet, the Eagle was obliged to cut her cable and run. Passing down wind behind the Saratoga, she took a new position where her long eighteens would bear on the British flagship, and there she opened an effective fire once more.
But this move had left the British Linnet free to devote her whole broadside to raking the Yankee flagship, and although the Eagle was of some help the chances of victory seemed at this time very much in favor of the British.
Macdonough’s Victory on Lake Champlain.