From an engraving in the “Naval Monument.”
But in spite of odds, Macdonough, was fighting his ship desperately and yet with a perfect mental grasp of the whole situation. Like Perry on Lake Erie, he set an example to his men by working a long gun with his own hands, and every shot he fired told with deadly effect. But as he bent over his gun at one moment a British shot cut the spanker-boom of the Saratoga in two and one of the pieces fell on him, knocking him senseless, so that the cry “The Commodore is killed” was passed along the deck. This cry was not true, for Macdonough was soon on his feet again, only to be once more knocked senseless and with a ghastly missile. The head of a captain of a gun was shot off and hurled with tremendous force against Macdonough’s head. But he soon recovered from this blow also—recovered only to find that, although he had steadily cut down the fire of the British flagship, the battle was persistently going against him.
The raking fire of the British brig Linnet was so effective that gun after gun was knocked out of the battle on the Saratoga. The British gun-boats had swarmed about the little sloop Preble and driven it away entirely. The Yankee schooner Ticonderoga had, indeed, at about the middle of the battle disabled the British sloop Finch, at the tail of the British line, so that she drifted ashore on Crab Island; but the British gun-boats, in spite of the Yankee gun-boats, were driving with the aid of oars right under the guns of the Ticonderoga, and she was compelled to give her whole attention to them and leave the Saratoga to fight it out with the British frigate and the British brig with such aid as the Eagle could render. And at the last Macdonough found that he had not one of the guns left on the fighting side of his ship with which to meet the enemy. Worse yet the Saratoga had been twice set on fire by the hot shot of the British frigate, and hot shot were still coming.
BATTLE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 1814.
American: Eagle, Saratoga, Ticonderoga, Preble.
English: Chubb, Linnet, Confiance, Finch.
Gun-boats and Galleys are represented by short black marks.
Notes To the Diagrams.
1. The British fleet arrived off Cumberland Head, and for a moment hung in the wind in line, in the position shown, off the head. They then sailed up abreast the American fleet and opened the battle, but the sloop Finch (d) was almost instantly driven away by the fire of the American schooner Ticonderoga (No. 3) and drifted toward Crab Island.