Macdonough was a youngster of twenty-eight years to whom was granted this opportunity denied the officers who had grown gray in the service. The navy, which was also very young, had set its own stamp upon him, and his advancement he had won by sheer ability. Self-reliant and indomitable, like Oliver Hazard Perry, he had wrestled with obstacles and was ready to meet the enemy in spite of them. His fame among naval men outshines Perry's, and he is rated as the greatest fighting sailor who flew the American flag until Farragut surpassed them all. The battle of Plattsburg Bay was contested straight from the shoulder with little chance for such evolutions as seeking the weather gage or wearing ship. With one fleet at anchor, as Nelson demonstrated at the Nile, the proper business of the other was to drive ahead and try to break the line or turn an end of it. This Captain Downie proceeded to attempt in a brave and highly skillful manner, with the _Confiance_ leading into the bay and proposing to smash the _Eagle_ with her first broadsides. The wind failed, however, and the British frigate dropped anchor within close range of the _Saratoga_, which displayed Macdonough's pennant, and pounded this vessel so accurately that forty American seamen, or one-fifth of the crew, were struck down by the first blast of the British guns. Meanwhile the _Linnet_ had reached her assigned berth and fought the American _Eagle_ so successfully that the latter was disabled and had to leave the line. To balance this the _Chub_ was so badly damaged that she drifted helpless among the American ships and was compelled to haul down her colors. The _Finch_ committed a blunder of seamanship and by failing to keep close enough to the wind, which soon died away, she finally went aground and took no part in the battle. The _Preble_ was driven from her anchorage and ran ashore under the Plattsburg batteries, and the _Ticonderoga_ played no heavier part than to beat off the little British galleys. The decisive battle was therefore fought by four ships, the American _Saratoga_ and _Eagle_, and the British _Confiance_ and _Linnet_. It was then that Macdonough acquitted himself as a man who did not know when he was beaten. The _Confiance_, which must have towered like a ship of the line, had so cruelly mauled the _Saratoga_ that she seemed doomed to be blown out of water. So many of his gunners were killed by the double-shotted broadsides that Macdonough jumped from the quarter-deck to take a hand himself and encourage the survivors. He was sighting a gun when a round shot cut the spanker boom, and a fragment of the heavy spar knocked him senseless.