do
their share. The captain of her opponent, the "Queen Charlotte,"
finding that his own carronades would not reach her, made sail ahead,
passed the "Hunter," and brought his battery to the support of the
"Detroit" in her contest with the "Lawrence" (Q_{2}). Perry's vessel
thus found herself under the combined fire of the "Detroit," "Queen
Charlotte," and in some measure of the "Hunter"; the armament of the
last, however, was too trivial to count for much.

Elliott's first placing of the "Niagara" may, or may not, have been
judicious as regards his particular opponent. The "Queen Charlotte's"
twenty-fours would not reach him; and it may be quite proper to take a
range where your own guns can tell and your enemy's cannot.
Circumstance must determine. The precaution applicable in a naval duel
may cease to be so when friends are in need of assistance; and when
the British captain, seeing how the case stood, properly and
promptly carried his ship forward to support his commander,
concentrating two vessels upon Perry's one, the situation was entirely
changed. The plea set up by Cooper, who fought Elliott's battle
conscientiously, but with characteristic bitterness as well as
shrewdness, that the "Niagara's" position, assigned in the line behind
the "Caledonia," could not properly be left without signal,
practically surrenders the case. It is applying the dry-rot system of
fleet tactics in the middle of the eighteenth century to the days
after Rodney and Nelson, and is further effectually disposed of by the
consentient statement of several of the American captains, that their
commander's dispositions were made with reference to the enemy's
order; that is, that he assigned a special enemy's ship to a special
American, and particularly the "Detroit" to the "Lawrence," and the
"Queen Charlotte" to the "Niagara." The vessels of both fleets being
so heterogeneous, it was not wise to act as with units nearly
homogeneous, by laying down an order, the governing principle of which
was mutual support by a line based upon its own intrinsic qualities.
The considerations dictating Perry's dispositions were external to his
fleet, not internal; in the enemy's order, not in his own. This was
emphasized by his changing the previously arranged stations of the
"Lawrence" and the "Niagara," when he saw Barclay's line. Lastly, he
re-enforced all this by quoting to his subordinates Nelson's words,
that no captain could go very far wrong who plac