At this Captain Lambert of the _Java_ decided to board the _Constitution_, and headed down toward the Yankee, who was thus brought well under the _Java’s_ lee bow, and it was now the _Java’s_ turn to take a raking. She got it with frightful effect, for she came end on until her jib-boom fouled the mizzen rigging of the _Constitution_. The Yankee topmen poured their fire into the gathering boarders on the _Java_. The Yankee gunners hurled round-shot, grape and canister that raked the _Java_ from stem to stern. The sails of the _Constitution_ were backed to hold her where she could continue the fire. The _Java’s_ bowsprit was shot away. It was the first of her spars to go and it dropped under her bows at 3 o’clock precisely. Five minutes later her foremast was chopped off by the Yankee round-shot, and it fell over the lee bow. The _Constitution_ forereached off the _Java’s_ bows, wore around, gave her broadsides from the fresh battery thus brought into play, came back to give her a further broadside, and, as the enemy swung around head on because of the drag of the wrecked foremast, the _Constitution_ wore again and gave her the port broadside. The _Java’s_ main topmast came crashing down from aloft. The gaff and boom of the spanker followed, and last of all, at five minutes before four o’clock her mizzen-mast was cut down as the foremast had been, carrying her last flag with it. [Illustration: The Battle Between the _Constitution_ and the _Java_.--I. (At five minutes past three o’clock as the _Java’s_ foremast fell.) _From an engraving by Havel, after a sketch by Lieutenant Buchanan._] A hearty Yankee “hurrah” rose from the deck of the _Constitution_. At the sound of it John Cheever, a sturdy Marblehead seaman, who was lying on deck apparently dead from a wound he had received, opened his eyes and, calling to a shipmate, asked what the noise was for, and in reply learned that the enemy had struck. Springing up on one hand he waved the other above his head and gave three cheers. But the last one ended with the death-rattle in his throat and he fell back dead. In just sixty-five minutes from the time that Commodore Bainbridge decided to risk the _Java’s_ raking fire he had her rolling on the long seas a complete wreck. And yet the pluck of the British crew was so great that their fire was not wholly silenced until ten minutes later, a fact of which any Anglo-Saxon, whatever his flag, may well feel proud. Seeing that the enemy was silenced, and his flag nowhere in sight, the _Constitution_ stood up to windward with every spar aloft in place, “ship-shape and Bristol fashion.” She had received one shot through the mizzen-mast, and some other spars had been clipped and grazed by the _Java’s_ fire; some of her running rigging and of her shrouds and stays had been slashed, but for practical purposes she was “fore and fit.” As the British _Naval Chronicle_ put it, “the _Java_ sustained unequalled injuries beyond the _Constitution_.”