nd so profit
by the qualities of his carronades. The Essex therefore hugged the wind;
but as she was thus passing the western point of the bay, under a press
of sail, a violent squall came down from the highland above, bearing the
vessel over on her side and carrying away the maintopmast, which fell
into the sea, drowning several of the crew. The loss of so important a
part of her sail power made escape to sea impossible, and the Essex
tried to regain the port. The wind, however, was adverse to the attempt
in her crippled condition, so that she was only able to reach the east
side of the bay, where she anchored about three miles from the city, but
within pistol-shot of the shore, before the enemy could overtake her. As
the conventional neutral line extends three miles from the beach, the
Essex was here clearly under the protection of Chilian neutrality.
Hillyar himself, in his official report of the action, says she was "so
near the shore as to preclude the possibility of passing ahead of her
without risk to His Majesty's ships." He seems, however, to have
satisfied his conscience by drawing a line between the neutrality of the
port and the neutrality of the country. The Essex was, he implies,
outside the former. "Not succeeding in gaining the limits of the part,
she bore up and anchored near the shore, a few miles to leeward of
it."[A] At all events, having his adversary at such serious
disadvantage, he did not propose to imitate the weakness Porter had
shown toward himself six weeks before.

The crucial feature in the approaching action was that the Essex was
armed almost entirely with carronades, and her principal enemy with long
guns. The carronade, now a wholly obsolete arm, was a short cannon, made
extremely light in proportion to the weight of the ball thrown by it.
The comparative lightness of metal in each piece allowed a greater
number to be carried, but at the same time so weakened the gun as to
compel the use of a small charge of powder, in consequence of which the
ball moved slowly and had but short range. In compensation, within its
range, it broke up the hull of an enemy's ship more completely than the
smaller but swifter ball from a long gun of the same weight; for the
same reason that a stone thrown by hand demolishes a pane of glass,
while a pistol-bullet makes a small, clean hole. It was this smashing
effect at close quarters which gave the carronade favor in the eyes of
one generation of seamen; but