rg Bay was contested straight from the shoulder
with little chance for such evolutions as seeking the weather gage or
wearing ship. With one fleet at anchor, as Nelson demonstrated at the
Nile, the proper business of the other was to drive ahead and try to
break the line or turn an end of it. This Captain Downie proceeded to
attempt in a brave and highly skillful manner, with the _Confiance_
leading into the bay and proposing to smash the _Eagle_ with her first
broadsides. The wind failed, however, and the British frigate dropped
anchor within close range of the _Saratoga_, which displayed
Macdonough's pennant, and pounded this vessel so accurately that forty
American seamen, or one-fifth of the crew, were struck down by the first
blast of the British guns.

Meanwhile the _Linnet_ had reached her assigned berth and fought the
American _Eagle_ so successfully that the latter was disabled and had to
leave the line. To balance this the _Chub_ was so badly damaged that
she drifted helpless among the American ships and was compelled to haul
down her colors. The _Finch_ committed a blunder of seamanship and by
failing to keep close enough to the wind, which soon died away, she
finally went aground and took no part in the battle. The _Preble_ was
driven from her anchorage and ran ashore under the Plattsburg batteries,
and the _Ticonderoga_ played no heavier part than to beat off the little
British galleys.

The decisive battle was therefore fought by four ships, the American
_Saratoga_ and _Eagle_, and the British _Confiance_ and _Linnet_. It was
then that Macdonough acquitted himself as a man who did not know when he
was beaten. The _Confiance_, which must have towered like a ship of the
line, had so cruelly mauled the _Saratoga_ that she seemed doomed to be
blown out of water. So many of his gunners were killed by the
double-shotted broadsides that Macdonough jumped from the quarter-deck to
take a hand himself and encourage the survivors. He was sighting a gun
when a round shot cut the spanker boom, and a fragment of the heavy spar
knocked him senseless.

Recovering his wits, however, he returned to his gun. But another shot
tore off the head of the gun captain and flung it in Macdonough's face
with such force that he was hurled across the deck. At length all but
one of the guns along the side exposed to the _Confiance_ had been
smashed or dismounted, and this last gun broke its fastening bolts,
leaped from its carriage w