During the critical time when Jones was bending every nerve to grapple with the Serapis, the Alliance made her first appearance, poured a broadside or two into the Richard, and disappeared. Of this remarkable deed Jones wrote to Dr. Franklin: "At last the Alliance appeared, and I now thought the battle at an end; but to my utter astonishment he discharged a broadside full into the stern of the Bon Homme Richard." It is probable that the Serapis also suffered from Landais's attack, but not so much as the Richard, which lay between the other two ships. After the Serapis and the Richard had been well lashed together, there began a new phase of the battle, which had already lasted about an hour. There were only three guns left in action on the Richard, nine-pounders on the quarter-deck, and the ship was badly leaking. The eighteen-pounders of the enemy had riddled the gun-deck of the American ship, rendering her, below-decks, entirely untenable. The real fight from this time to the end was consequently above-decks. Jones abandoned any attempt at great gun fire, except by the three small pieces on the quarter-deck, drew practically his entire remaining crew from below to the upper deck and the tops, and devoted his attention to sweeping the decks of the enemy by the musketry of his French marines from the quarter and poop decks, and of the American sailors in the tops. The crew of the Serapis, on the other hand, were forced mainly to take refuge in their well-protected lower decks, from which they continued to fire their great guns into the already riddled hull and lower decks of the Richard. After the juncture of the vessels Captain Pearson made several desperate attempts to cut the anchor loose, hoping in that way to become free again of the Richard, in which case he knew that the battle was his. Jones, of course, was equally determined to defend the anchor fastenings. He personally directed the fire of his French marines against the British in their repeated attempts to sever the two ships, to such good purpose that not a single British sailor reached the coveted goal. So determined was Jones on this important point that he took loaded muskets from the hands of his French marines and shot down several of the British with his own hand.