Meanwhile, on deck, the Commodore co-operated in the “awful activity” of the American batteries. At daylight, Perry, seeing that the castle was paying particular attention to the naval battery, ordered Tatnall in the Spitfire to approach and open upon it, in order to divert the fire from the land forces. Tatnall asked the Commodore at what point he should engage. Perry replied, “Where you can do the most execution, sir.” The brave Tatnall took Perry at his word. With the Spitfire and the Vixen, commanded by Joshua R. Sands, each having two gun-boats in tow, he steamed up to within eighty yards distance, and began a furious cannonade upon the fortress holding his position for a half hour. The fight resembled a certain one, pictured on a Netherlands historical medal, of a swarm of bees trying to sting a tortoise to death despite his armor. Here was a division of “mosquito boats” blazing away at the stone castle within a distance which had enabled the Mexicans to blow them out of the water had they handled their guns aright. The affair became not only exciting but ludicrous, when Tatnall and Sands took still closer quarters within the Punto de Hornos, where the little vessels were at first almost hidden from view in the clouds of spray raised by the rain of balls that vexed only the water. Tatnall’s idea seemed to be to give the surgeons plenty to do. Perry, however, did not believe in that sort of warfare. When he saw that the castle guns which had been trained away from the land to the ships were rapidly improving their range, he recalled the audacious fighters.
Tatnall at first was not inclined to see the signals. The Commodore then sent a boat’s crew with preemptory orders to return. Amid the cheers of the men who brought them, Tatnall obeyed, though raging and storming with chagrin. Most of the men on board his ships were wet, but none had been hurt. To retreat without bloody decks was not to his taste.
General Scott, a thorough American, had long rid himself of the old British tradition, that in all wars there must be “a big butcher’s bill.” This idea was not much modified until after the Crimean war, which was mostly butchery, and little science,—magnificent, but not war. The Soudan campaign of 1884 threatened a revival of it. We have seen how this idea dominated on the British side, in the wished-for “yard arm engagements” of the navy in 1812, and how, in place of it, the Americans bent their energies to skill in seamanship and gunnery; or, in other words, to victory by science and skill.
Perry and Scott were alike in their ideas and tastes, they regarded war more as the application of military science to secure national ends with rapidity and economy, than as a scrimmage in which results were measured by the length of the lists of killed and wounded. Tatnall, a veteran of the old school, however, seemed still to adhere to the old British ideal, and was keenly disappointed to find so few hurt on the American side.
From daybreak to one p. m., over six hundred Paixhans shells and solid shot were fired into the city by the naval battery. Fort St. Iago, which had concentrated its fire on the army batteries, now opened on the naval redoubt, the guns of which were at once trained in the direction of the new foe. A few applications of the science of artillery proved the unerring accuracy of Perry’s pupils, and St. Iago was silenced.
Captain Mayo and his officers through their glasses saw the Mexicans evacuate the fort. Chagrined at having no foemen worthy of their fire, he ordered both officers and sailors to mount the parapet and give three cheers. “If the enemy intends to fire another shot, our cheers will draw it,” said the gallant little Captain; but echo and then silence were the only answers. The naval guns having opened the breach so desired by General Scott and silenced all opposition, had now nothing further to do, were again left to cool. The naval battery had fired in all thirteen hundred rounds.
At 2 p. m., Captain Mayo turned over the command to Lieutenant Bissell and mounted his horse, the only one on the ground, to give Commodore Perry the earliest information of the enemy’s being silenced. As he rode through the camp, General Scott was walking in front of his tent. Captain Mayo rode up to him and said “General, they are done, they will never fire another shot.”
The General, in great agitation, asked “Who? Your battery, the naval battery?”
Mayo answered, “No, General, the enemy is silenced. They will not fire another shot.” He then related what had occurred.
General Scott in his joy almost pulled Captain Mayo off his horse, saying (to use his own expression) “Commodore, I thank you and our brothers of the navy in the name of the army for this day’s work.”[[18]]