one step further. Either way the issue
seemed desperate. But again they took their skipper's word for it and
rallied for a bloody struggle which soon swept the decks.

No more than twenty minutes had passed and the battle was won. The enemy
was begging for quarter. One boat had been sunk, three had drifted away
filled with dead and wounded, and the fifth was captured with thirty-six
men in it of whom only eight were unhurt. The American loss was
seven killed and twenty-four wounded, or thirty-one of her crew of
thirty-seven. Yet they had not given up the ship. The frigate Endymion
concluded that once was enough, and next morning the Prince de Neuchatel
bore away for Boston with a freshening breeze.

Those were merchant seamen also who held the General Armstrong against
a British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting
heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is
a story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated
that it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader
was a kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail
coat. His portrait might easily have served for that of a New England
deacon of the old school. No trace of the swashbuckler in this Captain
Samuel Reid, who had been a thrifty, respected merchant skipper until
offered the command of a privateer.

Touching at the Azores for water and provisions in September, 1814,
he was trapped in port by the great seventy-four-gun ship of the
line Plantagenet, the thirty-eight-gun frigate Rota, and the warbrig
Carnation. Though he was in neutral water, they paid no heed to this
but determined to destroy a Yankee schooner which had played havoc with
their shipping. Four hundred men in twelve boats, with a howitzer in
the bow of each boat, were sent against the General Armstrong in one
flotilla. But not a man of the four hundred gained her deck. Said an
eyewitness: "The Americans fought with great firmness but more like
bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats
sword in hand and put every soul to death as far as came within their
power. Some of the boats were left without a single man to row them,
others with three or four. The most that any one returned with was about
ten. Several boats floated ashore full of dead bodies.... For three days
after the battle we were employed in burying the dead that washed on
shore in the surf."

This trage