Up came the Essex, pretending to be a merchant ship and with the British flag flying. That is one of the tricks which naval officers play. They think it right to cheat an enemy. The stranger came bowling down under full sail and fired a gun as a hint for the supposed merchantman to stop. So the Essex backed her sails and hove to until the stranger had passed her stern.
Porter was now where he had wanted to get. He had the advantage of the wind—what sailors call the "weather-gage." So down came the British flag and up went the Stars and Stripes: and the ports were thrown open, showing the iron mouths of the guns, ready to bark.
When the English sailors saw this they cheered loudly and ran to their guns. They fired in their usual hasty fashion, making much noise but doing no harm. Porter waited till he was ready to do good work, and then fired a broadside that fairly staggered the British ship.
The Englishman had not bargained for such a salute as this, and now tried to run away. But the Essex had the wind, and in eight minutes was alongside. And in those eight minutes her guns were busy as guns could be. Then down came the British flag. That was the shortest fight in the war.
The prize was found to be the corvette Alert. A corvette is a little ship with not many guns. She was not nearly strong enough for the Essex, and gave up when only three of her men were wounded. But she had been shot so full of holes that she already had seven feet of water in her hold and was in danger of sinking. It kept the men of the Essex busy enough to pump her out and stop up the holes, so that she should not go to the bottom. Captain Porter did not want to lose his prize. He came near losing it, and his ship too, in another way, as I have soon to tell.
You must remember that he had taken other prizes and sent them home with some of his men. So he had a large number of prisoners, some of them soldiers taken from one of his prizes. There were many more British on board than there were Americans, and some of them formed a plot to capture the ship. They might have done it, too, but for the little midshipman, David Farragut.
This little chap was lying in his hammock, when he saw an Englishman come along with a pistol in his hand. This was the leader in the plot who was looking around to see if all was ready for his men to break out on the Americans.
He came up to the hammock where the boy lay and looked in at him. The bright young fellow then had his eyes tight shut and seemed to be fast asleep. After looking a minute the man went away. The instant he was out of sight up jumped the lad and ran to the captain's cabin. You may be sure he did not take many words to tell what he had seen.
Captain Porter knew there was no time to be lost. He sprang out of bed in haste and ran to the deck. Here he gave a loud yell of "Fire! Fire!"
In a minute the men came tumbling up from below like so many rats. They had been trained what to do in case of a night-fire and every man ran to his place. Captain Porter had even built fires that sent up volumes of smoke, so as to make them quick to act and to steady their nerves.