A few days later, seventy men arrived from Black Rock in a ship commanded by Perry's cousin, Sailing Master Stephen Champlin. Many were African Americans, others militiamen. Few had ever been on a ship before. Perry told Chauncey they were a 'motley set' but he had reached the point where he was pleased with anything 'in the shape of a man.' At the end of July, another sixty men arrived. Most were too sick to stand. Others still trembled with the residue of lake fever. In desperation, Perry tried recruiting men from the militia in Presque Isle, but only a handful responded.

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An ongoing worry was the possibility that during the darkness of night the British would send armed men in boats to destroy Perry's fleet. Perry pleaded with the Pennsylvania militiamen to stand guard aboard the unmanned ships. They refused. In a quotation that summed up why Regular Army and navy men despised the militia, the captain of one company told Perry, 'I told the boys to go … but the boys won't go.'

Shortly before midnight on July 31, Perry was awakened by an aide with startling news: The British squadron had disappeared. Their porthole lights were no longer visible offshore. Perry hurried to the lakefront to see for himself. The British had vanished. What had happened? Perry suddenly recalled a rumor that Captain Barclay had been invited to a dinner honoring him and his officers at Port Dover, on the Canadian shore. He had apparently accepted, confident that Perry was never going to get his five- hundred-ton brigs across the shallow bar at the mouth of Presque Isle's harbor.

We now know this was the case. At the dinner, the British veteran told his audience he expected to find 'the Yankee brigs hard and fast on the bar when I return, in which predicament it will be but a small job to destroy them.' Barclay had a few veteran lake sailors in his fleet who knew the depth of the Presque Isle bar, and his experienced eye had no difficulty computing how much water a five-hundred-ton brig drew.

What Barclay did not compute was Perry's seafaring know-how and the technical skills of the shipbuilders he had accumulated at Presque Isle. By 4 a.m. on Sunday, August 1, Perry had his fleet in line at the mouth of the harbor and was soon at work on getting the brigs Lawrence and Niagara across the bar. At first it appeared impossible. Daniel Dobbins carefully sounded the bar and found that with an east wind blowing, in some places there was only 4 1/2 feet of water; at no place was there more than a fathom (six feet). The brigs drew nine feet.

Perry, however, had devices that Captain Barclay apparently thought were too sophisticated for the Americans to construct: camels. In the shipyard, appropriately named shipwright Sidney Wright had constructed four of these gadgets. Invented by the Dutch, they were essentially rectangular watertight pontoons. When water was pumped into them, they sank. They were lashed to the ship, water was pumped out, and they rose, theoretically lifting the ship with them.

Lawrence was the first to be 'cameled.' The process turned out to be much more complicated in fact than the theorists expected. The first try lifted the brig only about three feet. Perry offloaded the cannons and stores. Men in small boats and some on foot in shallow water tugged heroically on cables, but Lawrence remained stuck in the muddy sand. A second try, with more camels, was made the following day. There was more desperate tugging from the sailors in the boats. The do-nothing Pennsylvania militiamen, inspired by the herculean challenge, volunteered their muscle power as well. On the morning of August 4, Lawrence slid into deep water, and the cannons were hastily returned on board.

Now it was Niagara's turn. By this time, Perry and the rest of his men were in their third day of continuous frantic effort, during which they got no more than snatches of sleep. On August 5, with Niagara stuck on the bar, about to be fitted with camels, the exhausted Americans were rattled by a cry: 'Sail ho!' It was Barclay, back from his testimonial dinner. There was scarcely a man aboard Lawrence. The rest of Perry's fleet had crossed the bar, but they were pipsqueaks, from a firepower point of view.

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