All of the battles which we have thus far described were fought on salt water, but two great victories were won on inland waters, and of one of these Thomas Macdonough was the hero. He had entered the navy in 1800, at the age of seventeen, served before Tripoli, and accompanied Decatur on the expedition which burned the Philadelphia. At the outbreak of the second war with England, he was sent to Lake Champlain, and set about the building of a fleet to repel the expected British invasion from Canada. The British were also busy at the other end of the lake, and on September 9, 1814, Macdonough sailed his fleet of fourteen boats, ten of which were small gunboats, and the largest of which, the Saratoga, was merely a corvette, into Plattsburg Bay, and anchored there. The abdication of Napoleon had enabled England to turn her undivided attention to America, and one great force was sent against New Orleans, while another was concentrated in Canada, for the purpose of invading New York by way of Lake Champlain. On this latter enterprise, a force of twelve thousand regulars started from Montreal early in August, while the British naval force on the lake was augmented to nineteen vessels. On September 11, this fleet got under way, and, certain of victory, sailed into Plattsburg Bay and attacked Macdonough. A terrific battle followed, in which the Saratoga had every gun on one side disabled and had to wear around under fire in order to use those on the other side. But three hours later, every British flag had been struck, and the land force, seeing their navy defeated, retreated hastily to Canada. So riddled were both squadrons that in neither of them did a mast remain upon which sail could be made. But the greatest victory of the war, the one which had the most important and far-reaching consequences, had been won a year before, far to the west, on the blue waters of Lake Erie, by Oliver Hazard Perry, at that time only twenty-eight years of age. Perry came of a seafaring stock, for his father was a captain in the navy, and the boy's first voyage was made with him in 1799. At the outbreak of the war of 1812, he was in command of a division of gunboats at Newport, but finding that, owing to the British blockade, there was little chance of his seeing active service in that position, he asked to be sent to the Great Lakes, whose possession we were preparing to dispute with England. The importance of this mission can hardly be overestimated. By the capture of Detroit, earlier in the war, the English had obtained undisputed control of Lake Erie, and were in position to carry out their plan of extending the Dominion of Canada along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers down to the Gulf, and so shutting in the United States upon the West. To Perry was assigned the task of stopping this project, and of regaining control of the lake.