Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (84 page)

But
Lawrence
is reeling under the British hammer blows. The tumult aboard the American flagship is appalling. Above the shrieks of the wounded and the dying and the rumblings of the gun carriages come the explosion of cannon and the crash of round shot splintering masts, tearing through bulwarks, ripping guns from carriages. Soon the decks are a rubble of broken spars, tangled rigging, shredded sails, dying men. And over all there hangs a thick pall of smoke, blotting out the sun, turning the bright September noon to gloomy twilight.

Lieutenant John Brooks, head of Perry’s marines, the handsomest officer at sea this day, a figure of “manly beauty, polished manners and elegant appearance,” turns, smiling, to pass a remark to Perry
when a cannonball tears into his hip, rips off a leg, hurls him across the deck. In terrible agony, Brooks screams for a pistol to end his life. Perry orders the marines to take him below. As they bend over him, Brooks’s little black servant boy, twelve years old, bringing cartridges to a nearby gun, sees his fallen master and flings himself, sobbing, to the deck. Usher Parsons can do nothing for Brooks, who asks in his pain how long he has to live. A few hours at most, the doctor tells him.

Perry’s first-lieutenant, John Yarnell, presents a grotesque appearance. His nose, perforated by a splinter, has swollen to twice its normal size. Blood from a scalp wound threatens to blind him. Parsons binds it with a bandanna, and Yarnell, returning to the deck, walks into a cloud of cattail down, torn from a pile of hammocks by round shot. Wounded a third time, he comes down once more for medical aid, his bloody face covered with down, looking like some gigantic owl. At this bizarre spectacle the wounded men cannot help laughing. “The devil has come for us!” they cry.

Perry seems to bear a charmed life. Men are dropping all around him; he suffers not a scratch. As he stops to give aid to one of his veteran gun captains, the man, drawing himself up, is torn in two by a twenty-four-pound ball. His second-lieutenant, Dulaney Forrest, is standing close to him when a shower of grape strikes him in the chest, knocking him to the deck. It is, fortunately, spent. As Perry asks Forrest if he is badly hurt, the stunned officer regains consciousness and cries, “I am not hurt, sir, but this is my shot!” and pulling out a handful from his waistcoat, pockets it as a souvenir.

The Commodore’s little brother, acting as a messenger during the din of battle, is also knocked senseless by a splinter but is otherwise unhurt. Still the Commodore remains untouched. For the next century, American naval men will speak in awe of Perry’s Luck. He is not, however, above helping that luck along. Not for Oliver Hazard Perry the glittering full-dress uniform of a Nelson or a Brock. He has no intention of being an easy target and has donned the plain blue jacket of a common sailor.

By 1:30,
Lawrence’s
sails are so badly shredded that the brig can no longer be controlled. In spite of the sand, the decks are slippery
with blood, which seeps through the seams and drips on the faces of the wounded in the wardroom below. These soon include Perry’s closest friend, the purser, Samuel Hambleton, whose shoulder blade has been fractured by a spent cannonball bouncing off a mast. Hambleton lies beside the dying Brooks, who makes a verbal will and asks him to look after his affairs.

The wounded are being taken down the hatch so quickly that Parsons can do little more than secure bleeding arteries and tie a few splints to shattered limbs. There is not time now for the amputations that must follow; only when a leg or arm hangs by a shred does the ailing surgeon stop to sever it.

Nor is there any protection from the battle raging above. At least five cannonballs rip through the walls of Parson’s makeshift hospital. The doctor has just finished applying a tourniquet to the mangled arm of a young midshipman, Henry Lamb, when a ball passes through the room, tears the boy out of the surgeon’s arms, and throws him against the wall, his body half severed. A seaman brought down with both arms fractured is scarcely in splints before another ball tears off his legs.

On the deck above, the carnage is dreadful as the gun crews are felled by the British grape. Perry calls down through the skylight to Parsons, asking him to send up one of his assistants to man a gun. The call is renewed every few minutes until the doctor has no help left.

Bizarre scenes and unlikely incidents punctuate the action, to remain in the minds of the survivors for years and to form part of the mythology of the battle. Two cannonballs pass through the powder magazine—without igniting it. Another enters the light room, knocks the snuff from a candle into a magazine; a gunner puts it out with his fingers before disaster can strike. One shot punctures a pot of peas boiling on deck and scatters them. David Bunnell, working his gun, notices that a pig has got loose and is greedily eating the peas even though both hind legs have been shot away. Another shot strikes a nearby gun, showering its crew with tiny pieces of gunmetal; one man is riddled from knees to chin with bits of cast iron,
some as small as a pinhead, none larger than buckshot. He recovers.

Bunnell is one of the few gunners left who has not been killed or wounded. A shot takes off the head of the man beside him, blowing his brains so thickly into Bunnell’s face that he is temporarily blinded. All marines have been ordered down from the masts to replace the gunners, and when the marines are put out of action Perry again calls down the hatch, “Can any of the wounded pull a rope?” Two or three manage to crawl on deck and lend a feeble hand. Wilson May, one of the sick, insists on relieving the men at the pumps so that they can help with the guns. He is not well and must sit down to do the job. At the battle’s end he is still sitting there, a bullet through his heart.

The major battle is between
Lawrence
on one side and the two largest British vessels—
Detroit
and
Queen Charlotte
—on the other. Elsewhere, things are going badly for the British.
Hunter
, unable to cope with the American carronades (her own shot is falling short) runs up to the head of the line to assist
Chippawa
. At the rear of the line, the four smaller American craft are battering their two opponents,
Lady Prevost
and
Little Belt
. A ball carries away the former’s rudder and she drifts helplessly out of action. Her commander, Lieutenant Edward Buchan, has been driven temporarily insane by a wound in the head.
Little Belt
also loses her commander; she runs to the head of the line and is out of the fight.

But where is Jesse Elliott and the new brig
Niagara?
To the fury of Perry’s officers and men, she is standing well off, using her long guns to little effect, too far out of range to bring her carronades into action. Elliott’s original orders were to attack
Queen Charlotte
, which is hammering away at Perry’s flagship. He has not done so.
Niagara
, twin to
Lawrence
, lurks behind the slower
Caledonia
, every spar in place, her crew scarcely scratched, her bulwarks unscarred.

What has got into Elliott? In the bitter controversy that follows, his supporters will give several explanations and his detractors will make as many charges. Is it a matter of cowardice? Few will believe that. Elliott has shown himself a brave and daring officer and will demonstrate that quality again before the battle is done. Is he merely
obeying orders to keep in line behind
Caledonia?
That is scarcely credible (though Elliott will argue it), for Perry’s other order—to engage
Queen Charlotte
—was unequivocal. Has the lightness of the wind made it impossible to move closer? If so, how have other ships been able to manoeuvre? And why, if he needs the wind, is his topsail backed and his jib brailed?

None of these alibis make sense. There is, however, one explanation that fits the circumstances. It devolves on Elliott’s known character, his ambitions, his mild paranoia. He is nettled at being superseded by a younger man, piqued at being taken out of the van at the last moment, is stubbornly hewing to the letter of Perry’s instructions (but only part of them) to stay a cable’s length from the vessel ahead. There is, perhaps, more than that. Elliott undoubtedly sees himself as the saviour of the day; when Perry is driven to strike his flag, he, Elliott, will move in.

On
Lawrence
, even the wounded are cursing Elliott.

“Why don’t they come and help us?” young Dulaney Forrest asks his superior, the bleeding Yarnell.

“We can expect nothing from that ship,” comes the bitter reply.

It is now past two. Perry’s flagship is a shambles. Most of her guns are useless, dismounted by the enemy’s shot, their breeches torn away, their carriages knocked to pieces. A handful of gunners stick to their posts, firing as quickly as they can. In his haste, David Bunnell sticks a crowbar down the muzzle of his cannon and fires that, too. The gun grows so hot from constant use that it jumps from its carriage. By now five of Bunnell’s crew of eight are casualties. He moves to the next gun, finds only one man left, brings up his surviving crew members and tries to get the weapon into action. As he does so he looks down the deck and is shocked by the spectacle—a tangle of bodies, some dead, some dying, the deck a welter of clotted blood, brains, human hair, and fragments of bones sticking to the rigging and planking. Of 137 officers and men aboard
Lawrence
, only 54 have escaped injury or death.

One by one,
Lawrence’s
guns fall silent until she lies like a log in the water. Suddenly
Niagara
gets under way. Elliott, apparently
believing Perry is dead, takes over and shouts an order to
Caledonia
, directly ahead, to move out of the line and let him pass—ostensibly to go to the aid of the disabled flagship. He does not do so. Instead, he passes
Lawrence
on the windward side, leaving that beleaguered vessel to the mercies of the British.

It is half-past two. Aboard
Detroit
, Barclay has been forced to go below to be treated for a bad wound in the thigh, secure in the belief that he has triumphed. His ship, too, has taken a fearful pummelling, its first officer dead, its spars and yards shattered, many of its guns out of action. The deck is clear of corpses, for the British do not share the American reverence for the dead and throw all bodies, except those of officers, immediately overboard. Here, too, is a bizarre spectacle: a pet bear, roaming the deck unhurt, licking up the blood.

Barclay’s optimism is premature. Perry has no intention of giving up. Whatever Elliott’s motives may be for staying out of the battle, he has at least left Perry a seaworthy brig, the equal of
Lawrence
, to continue the contest. Perry calls for a boat, takes four men, turns to Yarnell.

“I leave you to surrender the vessel to the enemy,” says Perry, and orders his men to pull for
Niagara
. Then he remembers his special flag and calls for it. Hosea Sergeant, the last survivor of Gun Crew Nine, hauls it down, rolls it into a tight wad, tosses it down to the boat.

“If victory is to be gained, I’ll gain it,” says Perry.

He cannot control his excitement, refuses to sit down until his men, fearful for his life, threaten to ship their oars. On
Detroit
, the British catch glimpses of the craft, half hidden by the gunsmoke. Musket balls whistle past Perry’s head, oars are shattered, round shot sends columns of spray into the boat, but Perry’s Luck holds. When a twenty-four-pound ball hits the side of the rowboat, Perry tears off his jacket to plug the hole.

On
Lawrence
, some of the wounded are attempting to talk the surviving officers into fighting on.

“Sink the ship!” they cry, and “Let us sink with her!”

But Yarnell has no intention of indulging in further sacrifice. As he reaches
Niagara
, Perry, with “unspeakable pain,” sees
Lawrence’s
flag come down. But the British cannot take the prize; all of
Detroit
’s boats have been shattered.

The American commodore is a scarecrow figure as he climbs aboard to greet the astonished Elliott, hatless, his clothes in tatters, blackened from head to foot by gunsmoke, spattered with blood.

“How goes the day?” asks Elliott, a fatuous question considering the state of the flagship.

“Bad enough,” says Perry. “We have been cut all to pieces.” Then to business: “Why are the gunboats so far behind?”

“I’ll bring them up,” says Elliott.

“Do so, sir,” Perry responds shortly.

Elliott takes the rowboat and in a remarkable display of personal bravery rows off through heavy fire to call the smaller craft forward into battle by speaking-trumpet. He himself takes command of
Somers
, where he indulges in a curious display of temperament. A cannonball whizzes across the deck, causing Elliott to duck. A gun captain laughs. In a fury, Elliott strikes him across the face with his trumpet and then proceeds to arrest the sailing master, whom he believes to be drunk. But he gets the gunboats quickly into action and pours a heavy fire on the British ships.

Perry is also in action. He has hoisted his personal flag on
Niagara
and is intent on cutting directly through the British line—an echo of Nelson’s famous feat at Trafalgar.

Barclay, back on deck, his wound dressed, anticipates the tactic. A fresh breeze has sprung up;
Niagara
is bearing down at right angles to his ship. In a few minutes she can rake her from bowsprit to taffrail, the full length of the vessel, with her broadside of ten guns. It is a manoeuvre that every commander fears.

Barclay knows what he must do. He will have to wear his ship—bring her around before the wind—so that his own broadside of undamaged guns can be brought to bear upon
Niagara
. Before he can effect the manoeuvre he is struck down again by a charge of grape-shot that tears his shoulder blade to pieces, leaving a gaping wound
and rendering his one good arm useless. At the same instant, his second-in-command, John Garland, falls mortally wounded. The ship is now in charge of Lieutenant George Inglis.