In the evening, under a full moon, four armed boats were sent from these vessels to cut out the privateer. As they approached her, they were warned off several times, but paid no attention to it, and attempted to board. Reid then opened fire on them, and drove them off with heavy loss. For greater security, the Armstrong was hauled up close to the fort, and moored. The Governor remonstrated with Captain Van Lloyd, commander of the English fleet; to which the captain answered that he was determined to destroy the privateer, and if the fort protected her he would bombard the town till not a house was left standing.
At midnight the Armstrong was attacked again, this time by fourteen launches, each carrying about fifty men. Reid promptly opened his broadside on them, with terrible effect; yet two or three of them succeeded in reaching the vessel, and the crew then met them with cutlass and pistol, and scarcely a man in them was left alive. A letter written from Fayal at the time, by an Englishman, says the officers in charge of the boats cheered on their men with a shout of "No quarter!" and that "the Americans fought with great firmness, but more like bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats, sword in hand, and put every soul to death, as far as came within their power. Several boats floated on shore, full of dead bodies."
Next morning, the Carnation sailed in and engaged the Armstrong; but after a short action she was badly cut up and obliged to haul off for repairs. Several guns on the Armstrong had been dismounted; and as Captain Reid now saw that her ultimate destruction was certain, he cut away her masts, blew a hole in her bottom, and went ashore with his men. Two of the crew had been killed, and seven wounded. The ascertained loss of the British was one hundred and twenty killed and ninety wounded.
After burning the abandoned wreck, Van Lloyd demanded of the Governor that the gallant little crew he had failed to capture should be given up to him as prisoners. This modest request was of course refused, and Captain Reid and his men then took possession of an old convent, declaring that they would defend themselves to the last. But they were not molested.
The vessel that was despatched to England to take home the British sailors wounded in this action, was not permitted to carry a single letter from anybody. Indeed, not only this affair, says Cobbett in his "Letters," but the loss of the Avon, the battle of Plattsburg, and other actions not creditable to the English arms, were carefully concealed from the English public. At the demand of Portugal, the British Government apologized for the violation of neutrality; but the owners of the Armstrong never obtained any indemnity.
This was the last naval action before the declaration of peace; but as that declaration did not immediately reach the cruisers at sea, three others were fought. On the 15th of January, 1815, Commodore Decatur, in the President, had a prolonged battle with the frigate Endymion, off Long Island, and reduced her to a wreck. But two other British cruisers came up, and he was compelled to surrender.
He had lost eighty men killed or wounded. On the 20th of February, the Constitution, Captain Charles Stewart, off the coast of Portugal, captured both the Cyane, of thirty-four guns, and the Levant, of twenty-one, after a battle of forty minutes, in which he lost fifteen men, and inflicted a loss of about forty. The Levant was subsequently recaptured by three English cruisers, while she was in Port Praya, another neutral harbor. On the 23d of March, the American brig Hornet, Captain James Biddle, and the British brig Penguin, Captain Dickenson, being almost exactly matched in men and metal, fought a battle of twenty-two minutes' duration, off the island of Tristan d'Acunha, at the close of which the Penguin, having lost forty-two men and been badly crippled, surrendered. Her commander was killed. The Hornet had one man killed and ten wounded. This was the last of what the London Times had fallen into the habit of calling "the painful events at sea."