Meanwhile, on deck, the Commodore co-operated in the “awful activity” of the American batteries. At daylight, Perry, seeing that the castle was paying particular attention to the naval battery, ordered Tatnall in the _Spitfire_ to approach and open upon it, in order to divert the fire from the land forces. Tatnall asked the Commodore at what point he should engage. Perry replied, “Where you can do the most execution, sir.” The brave Tatnall took Perry at his word. With the _Spitfire_ and the _Vixen_, commanded by Joshua R. Sands, each having two gun-boats in tow, he steamed up to within eighty yards distance, and began a furious cannonade upon the fortress holding his position for a half hour. The fight resembled a certain one, pictured on a Netherlands historical medal, of a swarm of bees trying to sting a tortoise to death despite his armor. Here was a division of “mosquito boats” blazing away at the stone castle within a distance which had enabled the Mexicans to blow them out of the water had they handled their guns aright. The affair became not only exciting but ludicrous, when Tatnall and Sands took still closer quarters within the Punto de Hornos, where the little vessels were at first almost hidden from view in the clouds of spray raised by the rain of balls that vexed only the water. Tatnall’s idea seemed to be to give the surgeons plenty to do. Perry, however, did not believe in that sort of warfare. When he saw that the castle guns which had been trained away from the land to the ships were rapidly improving their range, he recalled the audacious fighters. Tatnall at first was not inclined to see the signals. The Commodore then sent a boat’s crew with preemptory orders to return. Amid the cheers of the men who brought them, Tatnall obeyed, though raging and storming with chagrin. Most of the men on board his ships were wet, but none had been hurt. To retreat without bloody decks was not to his taste. General Scott, a thorough American, had long rid himself of the old British tradition, that in all wars there must be “a big butcher’s bill.” This idea was not much modified until after the Crimean war, which was mostly butchery, and little science,—magnificent, but not war. The Soudan campaign of 1884 threatened a revival of it. We have seen how this idea dominated on the British side, in the wished-for “yard arm engagements” of the navy in 1812, and how, in place of it, the Americans bent their energies to skill in seamanship and gunnery; or, in other words, to victory by science and skill. Perry and Scott were alike in their ideas and tastes, they regarded war more as the application of military science to secure national ends with rapidity and economy, than as a scrimmage in which results were measured by the length of the lists of killed and wounded. Tatnall, a veteran of the old school, however, seemed still to adhere to the old British ideal, and was keenly disappointed to find so few hurt on the American side.