Belowdecks, Surgeon’s Mate Usher Parsons struggled to help the wounded in the nine-by-ten-foot wardroom, which had become an improvised sickbay. Many were beyond hope. Lieutenant John Brooks, the commander of the marines, was struck in the thigh by a cannonball and horribly mangled. He was carried below, screaming in agony, begging Perry to kill him. The wardroom was no safer than the deck. ‘During the action five cannonballs passed through the room,’ Parsons told his parents in a letter shortly after the battle. Seconds after he finished putting a tourniquet on a midshipman’s arm, the young man was struck in the chest by a cannonball and instantly killed. A seaman with both arms fractured had both legs shattered by another hurtling twenty-four-pound projectile. He died within an hour.

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The final shot from Lawrence was fired by Perry himself, manning the last intact gun. When that gun too was knocked out, defeat seemed inevitable. Only eighteen men were still on their feet. The British ships stopped firing, expecting Perry to strike his colors. No other choice seemed possible.

But Perry’s eyes were on Niagara. The brig was performing a maneuver as strange as its previous actions. Pulling past Caledonia, Elliott came almost abeam Lawrence but he made no attempt to interpose his ship between the British and the stricken flagship. Caledonia was permitted to make this heroic gesture on its own.

One of Perry’s wounded lieutenants, following the captain’s eyes, snarled through teeth gritted with pain: ‘That brig will not help us. See how he keeps off and will not come to close action.’ ‘I’ll fetch him up,’ Perry said.

Gazing down the deck littered with dead and dying, Perry saw that his gig was still intact — another example of his incredible luck. He summoned two lieutenants and Sailing Master Taylor, all of them wounded, and left them in charge of Lawrence, with the authority to do whatever they judged necessary to save the lives of the wounded and the handful still unscathed. He ordered his personal battle flag, ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship,’ lowered from the mainmast. Many of the wounded on the deck wept and cried out in protest. They thought he was surrendering. So did the British.

Perry boarded the gig with four oarsmen and ordered them to pull for Niagara. Captain Barclay, with all his own small boats smashed, may have thought that Perry was coming to Detroit to surrender his sword. It took about five minutes for Perry to emerge from the shroud of battle smoke lying on the water and become visible to the British gunners. They opened up on him with every cannon still capable of firing. Round shot, canister, and grapeshot hissed around the boat. But Perry’s luck made him and his boat crew inviolable. The oarsmen and the captain were drenched with spray, and one version has it that the oars were splintered and the boat was holed. But in fifteen minutes, Perry was within hailing distance of Niagara.

Grimy with powder, haggard with exhaustion, Perry came aboard to be greeted by Elliott with the most inane imaginable question: ‘How is the day going?’

‘Bad enough,’ Perry snarled. ‘We have been cut all to pieces.’ He paused momentarily, and glanced toward Lawrence, drifting helplessly, then peered at the distant gunboats. ‘Why are the gunboats so far astern?’

‘I’ll bring them up,’ Elliott said.

‘Do so, sir,’ was Perry’s curt retort.

The unspoken part of this supposed conversation is far more significant. Elliott, obviously mortified to find Perry still alive, was anxious to get as far away from him as possible. Perry, still determined to win the battle, was even more inclined to give him no share in the victory. There was no reason to order Elliott, the second ranking American officer in the fleet, to bring the gunboats into the fray. A junior officer or a midshipman could have relayed the command. Their handful of cannons could not have much impact on the struggle. The mere fact that Elliott surrendered command of his ship is virtually de facto proof that he was ashamed of his treacherous performance and incapable of facing Perry, much less fighting beside him.

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