The battle that followed was another remarkable exhibit of the superiority of the Yankee gunners. For ten minutes they hurled bar-shot and other missiles at the rigging of the ill-fated Penguin. “In a very short time” these projectiles “had done their work.” And then the Yankee gunners began to load with solid shot, loading swiftly as the gunners had done in the Hornet’s action with the British Peacock, but aiming with deliberation. And so, “notwithstanding a heavy swell prevailed,” every broadside “was taking effect.” The quotations are from Allen. “Taking effect” expressed the result of the Yankee fire but mildly. Captain Dickenson, of the Penguin, described the work much more forcibly. He said to First Lieutenant McDonald: “The fellows are giving it to us like hell.”
They had thought to encounter one of the sea-militia, but they found a well-trained Yankee man-of-war crew instead.
The Penguin having the weather-gage, in spite of her crippled rigging, was steadily drawing down on the Yankee. It was plain that the British gunners were no match for the Yankees, and Captain Dickenson determined to try boarding. Putting up his helm he sent his ship straight at the Hornet. Just then a bullet stretched him dead on the deck, but First Lieutenant James McDonald took his place and bravely called on the men to follow him. The British bow came crashing against the Hornet’s side just abaft the main rigging. The Yankees flocked to the quarter-deck to repel boarders. The blunt cutwater of the British bow sawed up and down on the black waist of the Hornet, rasping the thick planks as if to break them in; but the boarders never came over to the bow.
“We tried,” said McDonald, afterward, “but found the men rather backward—and so, you know, we concluded to give it up.”
The Yankee crew wanted, then, to board the Penguin but Captain Biddle stopped them, because it was “evident from the beginning that our fire was greatly superior both in quickness and effect.”
The Hornet and Penguin.
From a wood-cut in the “Naval Monument.”
Moreover, there was no need for that movement. The Hornet forged ahead over the heavy sea, and the bowsprit of the Penguin caught her mizzen rigging and carried it away, and then the boat davits and spanker-boom as well. The broken boom dropped on a marine who had already had his leg broken by a musket-ball and it broke the leg again, yet the eager fellow wriggled around and strove to point his musket at the British in the foretop of the Penguin. The Penguin’s chief officer shouted that he had surrendered, and Captain Biddle, after ordering his men to cease firing, climbed up on the Hornet’s rail. At that two of the British marines, who, very likely, had not heard their chief officer surrender, fired at Biddle and at the man at the Hornet’s wheel. Biddle was severely wounded, and the two marines were instantly killed by a return fire from the Americans.
Then the Penguin drifted clear. Her bowsprit fell into the sea, broken short off above the figure-head, and her foremast fell over the lee rail. Her bow came up into the wind, and with such canvas as was spread on her mainmast flat aback, she drifted stern on, a helpless wreck.