Had the American crew been in a proper state of discipline, the struggle would have taken an extraordinary character, and the two ships might have renewed the combat, without officers, and in a more or less unmanageable condition. Fortunately for Broke, his fifty men outnumbered the Americans on the spar-deck, while the men below, for the most part, would not come up. About a score of sailors and marines were on the forecastle, and about a dozen more rushed up from below, led by the second lieutenant, George Budd, as soon as he, at his station on the main-deck, learned what was happening above; but so rapidly did the whole affair pass, that in two minutes the scuffle was over, the Americans were killed or thrown down the hatchway, and the ship was helpless, with its spar-deck in the hands of Broke’s boarders. The guns ceased firing, and the crew below surrendered after some musket-shots up and down the hatchways. The disgrace to the Americans did not consist so much in the loss of a ship to one of equal force, as in the shame of suffering capture by a boarding-party of fifty men. As Lawrence lay wounded in the cockpit, he saw the rush of his men from the spar-deck down the after-ladders, and cried out repeatedly and loudly, “Don’t give up the ship! blow her up!” He was said to have added afterward: “I could have stood the wreck if it had not been for the boarding.” Doubtless the “Shannon” was the better ship, and deserved to win. Her crew could under no circumstances have behaved like the crew of the “Chesapeake.” In discipline she was admittedly superior; but the question of superiority in other respects was not decided. The accident that cut the “Chesapeake’s” jib-sheet and brought her into the wind was the only decisive part of the battle, and was mere ill luck, such as pursued the “Chesapeake” from the beginning. As far as could be seen, in the favorite American work of gunnery the “Shannon” showed no superiority.