At 5 a.m. the next day, Perry was still asleep in his cabin when a fist pounded on the door and someone shouted, ‘Sail ho!’ He was soon on the quarterdeck, peering into the distance at the sails of the British fleet approaching Put-in-Bay. At 7 a.m. he ordered his fleet to get underway. The southwest breeze was distressingly light. Perry ordered out boats to tow Lawrence around the two islands that sheltered the bay. As the men strained at the oars, Perry glanced up at the blue sky. Above them hovered an eagle. He pointed out the national bird to nearby sailors as a good omen.

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As they neared the open lake, Perry’s prophecy about the eagle seemed to come true. The breeze abruptly shifted to the southeast, giving the American fleet the ‘weather gauge’ — the ability to attack with the wind in their favor. On all nine ships the grim preparations for battle were in progress. The decks were sprinkled with sand, then sprayed with water to guarantee a footing when they became slippery with blood. Cutlasses for boarding parties were stacked in opportune places. Round shot, canister, and grapeshot were piled beside the guns.

The breeze remained light, in fact too light for Perry’s battle plan. With the lake as calm as the proverbial millpond and Perry’s ships moving at a bare two knots, the advantage lay with the British long guns. To counter this threat, Perry ordered the schooners Ariel and Scorpion, which had long guns, to take positions on Lawrence’s weather bow. But they were a weak response at best, with only five guns between them. Even more worrisome was the way the four U.S. gunboats — Somers, Tigress, Porcupine, and Trippe — had fallen a good two miles behind, a dolorous tribute to their former careers as plodding merchantmen.

Detroit’s long guns opened a murderous fire on the all-but-drifting Americans, with Lawrence its main target. The green wood and hasty construction of the Presque Isle shipyard soon became apparent. A musket ball could penetrate Lawrence’s sides, which were only two inches thick. Twelve- and twenty-four-pound shot ripped through the hull, tearing off arms and legs and flinging deadly splinters into men’s bodies.

It was an agonizing ordeal to which Perry’s carronades, still out of range, could make no reply. When he finally drew within seven hundred yards, Perry fired a broadside and was dismayed to see it made little impression on Detroit, whose planking was a foot thick and was reinforced by far more frames than Perry’s ships.

While Perry piled on every yard of sail aboard his flagship to get closer to Detroit, Jesse Elliott in Niagara seemed content to keep his distance and bombard his assigned antagonist, Queen Charlotte, with his two long-range twelve-pounders. Since Charlotte was armed with twenty-four-pounder carronades, it could not return the fire. Its captain bore away and joined Detroit in the attack on Lawrence.

That was bad news for Perry. By the time he closed to three hundred yards and began blasting Detroit with his carronades, the devastatingly accurate fire of Barclay’s long guns had left many of his men dead or wounded. Two smaller British ships, Hunter and Chippeway, took on Ariel and Scorpion, depriving Lawrence of their support.

‘Why doesn’t Niagara come to help us?’ more than one sailor asked Perry as he strode the deck, encouraging his men and directing their fire. It was a question very much on Perry’s mind, as broadsides from Queen Charlotte began to wreak havoc on his ship. All Perry and his men could do was fight for their lives in a losing battle. For more than two hours Lawrence took fearful punishment from both ships, while Elliott made no attempt to join the fight.

Sailing Master William Taylor, who had warned Perry about Elliott, later wrote, ‘The Lawrence alone received the fire of the whole British squadron … we were not supported as we ought to have been.’ By 2:30, Taylor reported, ‘22 men and officers lay dead on decks and 66 wounded, every gun dismounted, carriages knocked to pieces, every strand of rigging cut off, mast and spars shot and tottering overhead in just an unimaginable wreck.’

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