A moment later, and while yet the men were grinning at their bird, Macdonough stooped over a long twenty-four on the quarter-deck of the _Saratoga_ until he could see the bow of the coming _Confiance_ through the sights, when he stepped back and fired the gun. And then his men cheered again for the shot struck the _Confiance_ near the port hawse-pipe and raked her the full length of her gun-deck, killing and wounding several men and smashing her steering-wheel at the last. At that the long guns of the whole American squadron began to talk. The British sloop _Chubb_ and the British brig _Linnet_ had now arrived near the Yankee brig _Eagle_, and the British frigate _Confiance_ was soon abreast of the American _Saratoga_. The _Chubb_ strove to take a position for raking the Yankee _Eagle_, but the _Eagle_ was swung to give her one broadside and that was enough. Wholly disabled, she drifted down wind along the American line. More than half of her crew were killed and wounded, and one shot more having been fired into her as she approached the _Saratoga_, she hauled down her flag, when midshipman Charles F. Pratt boarded her and took her over toward Plattsburg, clear of the line of battle. But five of her crew were able to stand up when she arrived. But before this was done the British Captain Downie had brought his flagship to anchor abreast of the Yankee flagship _Saratoga_ at a distance of three hundred or four hundred yards. Not a shot had been fired so far from this ship, but when she had been moored with a spring to her cable, and her guns had been carefully aimed the sixteen long twenty-fours, double shotted, were discharged as one. Every shot struck the Yankee flagship, and that was the most frightful blast received by any Yankee ship in all this war. The _Saratoga_ reeled and shivered as the iron ploughed through her planks and timbers. More than one hundred men were thrown to the deck by the shock, and forty of them failed to get up, for they were killed or wounded, First Lieutenant Peter Gamble being among the slain. [Illustration: The Battle of Plattsburg. _From an old wood-cut._] This was done not far from 9 o’clock, and from that time on the Yankee _Saratoga_ and the _Eagle_ were the targets for the British _Confiance_ and _Linnet_ that together carried a weight of long gun metal exactly equal to that of the whole American squadron. It was a terribly unequal fight. There were eight long twelves and sixteen long twenty-fours driving their solid shot into the two Yankees that could reply with only four long twenty-fours and four long eighteens. And the British flagship threw some red-hot shot.