DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE
OF THE
CONSTITUTION
WITH
CYANE and LEVANT.
The Constitution had come ploughing down with the wind over her port quarter. As she arrived opposite the two ships she stripped off her canvas, as a fighter his shirt, and wearing around she ranged up on the starboard tack to windward of the two Britishers, and at 6.10 o’clock, with the Cyane two hundred and fifty yards away on the port quarter, and the Levant as far away on the port bow, opened fire on both. The plucky seamen of the British ships replied instantly, and for fifteen minutes every gun on all three ships that could be brought to bear was worked with the fiercest energy. The huge cloud of smoke that arose from the Yankee guns completely fogged in the enemy, but the enemy’s fire had notably slackened away, and Captain Stewart ordered his men to cease firing in order that he might see where the enemy lay.
As the smoke drifted down-wind, the spars of the sloop Levant were disclosed right abeam. The Constitution had forged ahead in the fifteen minutes’ firing, and she had the Levant directly under her guns. But because the Constitution had forged ahead, the Cyane had obtained a little more sea-room, as well as immunity from the fire of the Constitution, and she was just beginning to luff up across the Constitution’s stern when the thinning smoke revealed her.
An opportunity for a most beautiful display of Yankee seamanship had come. Firing a staggering blow from double-shotted guns at the Levant off his lee beam, Captain Stewart threw the sails on the Constitution’s main and mizzen masts flat aback, and then bracing in the foresails till they just fluttered in the breeze, he drove her stern on, back across the bow of the luffing English frigate, and raking her fore and aft, compelled her to fill away. Then after partly filling his sails, to keep the Constitution beside the enemy, he fired such deadly broadsides into her that the men were driven from her guns, and her fire almost ceased. As a right good song says:
Then a lifting rift in the mist showed up
The stout Cyane close-hauled
To swing in our wake and our quarter rake,
And a boasting Briton bawled:
“Starboard or larboard we’ve got him fast
Where his heels won’t take him through;