Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/186

 1 66

��A Summer on the Great Lakes.

��the answering signals went up in the sunhght and the cheers rang over the water. All together now bore down upon the enemy and, passing through his line, opened a raking crossfire. So close and terrible was that fire that the crew of the Lady Prevost ran below, leaving the wounded and stunned com- mander alone on the deck. Shrieks and groans rose fi-om every side. In fifteen minutes from the time the signal was made Captain Barclay, the British commander, flung out the white flag. The firing then ceased ; the smoke slowly cleared away, revealing the two fleets commingled, shattered, and torn, and the decks strewn with dead. The loss on each side was the same, one hundred and thirty-five killed and wounded. The combat had lasted about three hours. When Perry saw that victory was secure he wrote with a pencil on the back of an old letter, resting it on his navy cap, the despatch to General Harrison : ' We have met the enemy, and they are ours : two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop.'

" It was a great victory," concluded the eloquent narrator. " The young conqueror did not sleep a wink that night. Until the morning light he was on the quarter-deck of the Lawrence, doing what he could to relieve his suf- fering comrades, while the stifled groans of the wounded men echoed from ship to ship. The next day the dead, both the British and the American, were buried in a wild and solitary spot on the Aore. And there they sleep the sleep of the brave, with the sullen waves to sing their perpetual requiem."

We sat in silence a long time afler ; no one was disposed to speak. It came to us with power there on the moonlit lake, a realization of the hard- fought battle, the gallant bearing of the

Vol. II. — No. I.— D.

��young commander, his daring passage in an open boat through the enemy's fire to the Niagara, the motto on his flag, the manner in which he carried his vessel alone through the enemy's Hne, and then closed in half pistol-shot, his laconic account of the victory to his superior oiificer, the ships stripped of their spars and canvas, the groans of the wounded, and the mournful spec- tacle of the burial on the lake shore. Our next stopping-place was at Detroit, the metropolis of Michigan, on the river of the same name, the colony of the old Frenchman De la Mothe Cadillac, the colonial Pontchartrain, the scene of Pontiac's defeat and of Hull's treachery, cowardice, or incapacity, grandly seated on the green Michigan shore, overlooking the best harbor on the Great Lakes, and with a population of more than one hundred thousand. Two stormy days kept us within doors most of the time. The third day we were again " on board," steaming up Detroit River into Lake St. Clair. On and on we kept, till the green waters of Huron sparkled beneath the keel of our steamer. All the way over the lake we kept the shores of Michigan in sight, beaches of white sand alternating with others of limestone shingle, and the forests behind, a tangled growth of cedar, fir, and spruce in impenetrable swamps, or a scanty, scrubby growth upon a sandy soil. Two hours were spent at Thunder Bay, where the steamer stopped for a supply of wood, and we went steaming on toward Mack- inaw, a hundred miles away. At sun- set of that day the shores of the green rocky island dawned upon us. The steamer swept up to an excellent dock, as the sinking sun was pouring a stream of molten gold across the flood, out of the amber srates of the west.

�� �