It is absurd to deny to the Americans courage of the very finest quality, but the amazing and unexpected severity of the _Shannon's_ fire had destroyed for the moment their _morale_, and the British were in a mood of victory. The boatswain of the _Shannon_, an old _Rodney_ man, lashed the two ships together, and in the act had his left arm literally hacked off by repeated strokes of a cutlass and was killed. One British midshipman, followed by five topmen, crept along the _Shannon's_ foreyard and stormed the _Chesapeake's_ foretop, killing the men stationed there, and then swarmed down by a back-stay to join the fighting on the deck. Another middy tried to attack the _Chesapeake's_ mizzentop from the starboard mainyard arm, but being hindered by the foot of the topsail, stretched himself out on the mainyard arm, and from that post shot three of the enemy in succession. Meanwhile the fight on the deck had been short and sharp; some of the Americans leaped overboard and others rushed below; and Laurence, lying wounded in his steerage, saw the wild reflux of his own men down the after ladders. On asking what it meant, he was told, "The ship is boarded, and those are the _Chesapeake's_ men driven from the upper decks by the English." This so exasperated the dying man that he called out repeatedly, "Then blow her up; blow her up." The fight lasted exactly thirteen minutes--the broadsides occupied six minutes, the boarding seven--and in thirteen minutes after the first shot the British flag was flying over the American ship. The _Shannon_ and _Chesapeake_ were bearing up, side by side, for Halifax. The spectators in the pleasure-boats were left ruefully staring at the spectacle; those American handcuffs, so thoughtfully provided, were on American wrists; and the Boston citizens had to consume, with what appetite they might, their own banquet. The carnage on the two ships was dreadful. In thirteen minutes 252 men were either killed or wounded, an average of nearly twenty men for every minute the fight lasted. In the combat betwixt these two frigates, in fact, nearly as many men were struck down as in the whole battle of Navarino! The _Shannon_ itself lost as many men as any 74-gun ship ever lost in battle. Judge Haliburton, famous as "Sam Slick," when a youth of seventeen, boarded the Chesapeake as the two battered ships sailed into Halifax. "The deck," he wrote, "had not been cleaned, and the coils and folds of rope were steeped in gore as if in a slaughter-house. Pieces of skin with pendent hair were adhering to the sides of the ship; and in one place I noticed portions of fingers protruding, as if thrust through the outer walls of the frigate."