In effect they had canceled each other out, but the fighting would go on until they had reduced each other to wrecks. Meanwhile, the American sloops Pawnee and Housatonic closely engaged Resistance’s other side. Her gun crews had been so winnowed that there were few to man the guns on that side as the sloops concentrated on holing her below the water line. Shot after shot had so dislodged and torn the armor plates and shattered the teak behind them that water began to fill compartment after compartment.
The center of the battle swirled around the two armored flagships as Black Prince finally came alongside New Ironsides again. Seymour had seen the shot bounce off New Ironsides and was determined to lay himself alongside, where his gunners could fire through the enemy’s gun ports. Black Prince’s Captain knew his business and was getting everything from his ship and crew that they had to give. It was bruising and bloody work, for the American captain also knew his job. Wainwright would have to earn this victory the hard way.
Nevertheless, Wainwright knew he had the advantage. As damaged as his flagship was she still had complete maneuverability while the Ironsides was dead in the water. Huge projectiles sailed back and forth between the two ships, smashing through plate and wooden backing as Black Prince steamed past slowly, so close as to sometimes grind its casemate against the American’s. At this distance, New Ironsides’s gun crews switched to shell, set at point-blank range with all three lead fuse settings torn off. They not only tore through the armor and backing but ignited the splintered wood as well. Here and there guns went silent as the crews rushed to fight the fires. Black Prince was answering slowly to the helm with her flooded bow acting as a dead weight. Turning about, Wainwright was engaged by the sloops Canandaigua and Powhatan but, he shook off their fire to reengage New Ironsides.
Admiral Seymour would have her. And in his single-mindedness, he tried to step into Wainwright’s shoes and forgot the rest of his squadron. He had wounded New Ironsides, and now he was in for the kill. His spirit would have soared if he knew how close he was. His 68-pounders had battered New Ironsides’s pilothouse so severely that a chunk of metal had detached from the inner wall and struck Dahlgren a great gash in the thigh, sending him crashing into the bulkhead in a spray of blood. Rowan was first at his side to staunch the bleeding. It was a nasty wound. The deck pooled with the old man’s bright blood. When at last it ebbed, Dahlgren lay ashen on the deck. Rowan ordered him carried below, but the older man gasped as three seamen lifted him. His hand clutched at the captain’s coat. “Rowan, keep pounding. We can stand it longer than they can. Pound ’em. My guns won’t let you down.”
On the spar deck Ulric Dahlgren was with the Marines manning one of those very guns-a 5.1-inch Dahlgren rifle. He had applauded the accuracy of the men with that piece and had been as admiring, albeit more ruefully, of the accuracy of the British Armstrong gunners on Black Prince’s own spar deck. Their guns stopped one by one, whether hit or not, and the Dahlgren muzzle-loading rifle continued firing. Ulric had unconsciously hobbled up to take the place of a crewman felled by a splinter. By then the men had no time to spare for the bizarre scene of a one-legged Army colonel feeding the guns just like a tar. The gold eagles on his shoulder straps were more than incongruous. They attracted the fire of Royal Marine riflemen. The deck splintered around him, and rounds pinged off the gun. Another man fell to writhe on the deck. All the Marines aboard, not manning guns, had been issued the Spencers Admiral Dahlgren had so presciently ordered. Their volume of fire quickly dropped the enemy’s Marines from the rigging and forced those on deck under cover.
By now Captain Wainwright had brought Black Prince alongside New Ironsides again. Young Dahlgren saw an officer through the smoke shout through a megaphone, “Do you strike?”
Ulric hobbled to the side, his cap blown off and his blond hair streaked with powder. He cupped his hands and replied as the son of an admiral, “The Navy never strikes!” His Marines cheered. He looked back at them and winked, then turned to shout across the water again, “And neither does the U.S. Army!” Amazingly, the Marines cheered again, delighted with his pluck, Army or no Army. The gunner fired to punctuate their approval.
Aboard Black Prince, the officer was blown off his feet, his clothes shredded and his megaphone sailing over the other side of the ship. He got up and staggered to report back to Seymour in his armored conning tower. The admiral looked at the man’s glassy eyes and singed and torn uniform, and asked, “Well?”
“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.”
Seymour blinked and said, “What did you say?”
“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.” Then he fell over.
Before Seymour could try to make sense of this, his flag captain, Arthur Cochrane, interrupted with the damage report from Black Prince’s captain. It drained away much of his confidence. More than half his guns were silenced. The armored casemate was torn and rent the entire length of the ship. The men were fighting fires in a half dozen places. The upper decks had been swept with exploding shells until it was a shambles. The American sloops were steaming back forth, pounding the exposed side of the ship and forcing it to fight in two directions.
For Seymour, the whole battle had telescoped into the struggle between these two ships. Whoever triumphed would win the entire battle. It all rested on that. “Put her alongside, muzzle to muzzle, and we shall fight it out, Captain. Be prepared to board,” he told Wainwright. The cry went out to assemble boarding parties. Seymour did not flinch as the two ships lurched into each other with a grinding squeal of metal on metal that would have frightened hell. The gun crews had been so worked up to the fighting that they barely took note of the eerie noise that echoed through the gun decks.
The only thing that kept the guns in action was New Ironsides’s seventeen-degree outward slant of her hull. Otherwise, the opposing hull would have shut the gun ports and the guns would have been unable to be run out. Locked in death’s embrace, the two ships fired and fired-the British gunners now had open gun ports, small as they were, to sight through only yards away-gutting each other and smashing the opposing gun decks until only a handful of guns functioned on either side. For the British boarding parties waiting expectantly for the impact, the noise went straight through them, their hearts pounding in the few still seconds before the order to board was given. “Board!” They raced to the side and threw their grapples to snag the enemy. A few made it over the yawning gap made by the American hull’s slant, but the boarding parties were stopped at the sides, unable to leap across so wide a space. Massed on the side they made too good a target for the U.S. Marine sharpshooters. Concentrated fire into the tight groups of sailors and Marines dropped a score and drove the rest under cover.