Because some of the long twenty-fours on the British _Confiance_ were after the first broadside turned toward the Yankee _Eagle_, which already was in a fierce fight with the British _Linnet_, the _Eagle_ was obliged to cut her cable and run. Passing down wind behind the _Saratoga_, she took a new position where her long eighteens would bear on the British flagship, and there she opened an effective fire once more. But this move had left the British _Linnet_ free to devote her whole broadside to raking the Yankee flagship, and although the _Eagle_ was of some help the chances of victory seemed at this time very much in favor of the British. [Illustration: Macdonough’s Victory on Lake Champlain. _From an engraving in the “Naval Monument.”_] But in spite of odds, Macdonough, was fighting his ship desperately and yet with a perfect mental grasp of the whole situation. Like Perry on Lake Erie, he set an example to his men by working a long gun with his own hands, and every shot he fired told with deadly effect. But as he bent over his gun at one moment a British shot cut the spanker-boom of the _Saratoga_ in two and one of the pieces fell on him, knocking him senseless, so that the cry “The Commodore is killed” was passed along the deck. This cry was not true, for Macdonough was soon on his feet again, only to be once more knocked senseless and with a ghastly missile. The head of a captain of a gun was shot off and hurled with tremendous force against Macdonough’s head. But he soon recovered from this blow also--recovered only to find that, although he had steadily cut down the fire of the British flagship, the battle was persistently going against him. The raking fire of the British brig _Linnet_ was so effective that gun after gun was knocked out of the battle on the _Saratoga_. The British gun-boats had swarmed about the little sloop _Preble_ and driven it away entirely. The Yankee schooner _Ticonderoga_ had, indeed, at about the middle of the battle disabled the British sloop _Finch_, at the tail of the British line, so that she drifted ashore on Crab Island; but the British gun-boats, in spite of the Yankee gun-boats, were driving with the aid of oars right under the guns of the _Ticonderoga_, and she was compelled to give her whole attention to them and leave the _Saratoga_ to fight it out with the British frigate and the British brig with such aid as the _Eagle_ could render. And at the last Macdonough found that he had not one of the guns left on the fighting side of his ship with which to meet the enemy. Worse yet the _Saratoga_ had been twice set on fire by the hot shot of the British frigate, and hot shot were still coming. [Illustration: BATTLE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 1814. =American=: Eagle, Saratoga, Ticonderoga, Preble. =English=: Chubb, Linnet, Confiance, Finch. Gun-boats and Galleys are represented by short black marks.] NOTES TO THE DIAGRAMS.