Waiting until within close range Captain Reid opened on them. “The discharge from our long tom rather staggered them,” but they instantly recovered and, returning the fire with carronades, boat-howitzers, and muskets, they gave three cheers and bravely dashed in at the schooner. One round was all that Captain Reid could give them from his four cannon, for they were at the schooner’s low rail before he could reload. There was nothing for it then but to fight, man to man, man-fashion. With their sharpened cutlasses the British seamen strove to cut their way to the schooner’s deck, while the marines with muskets and bayonets strove to clear the Yankees away from the schooner’s rail. But the Yankees with muskets and pistols for a few rounds and with pikes and cutlasses and axes stood to their post and stabbed and slashed and chopped back. The British came on with fierce cheers and cries; the Yankees with close-shut mouths and bared arms split open the British heads down to the yelling mouths, and cut the throats and broke in the backs of those that twisted and turned to find a way on board. The enemy had come in three divisions; they swarmed at the stern and the waist and the bow. There were more than three hundred of them to the eighty-eight Americans, and for forty minutes the British fought with a vigor born of hatred, contempt, and mortified pride. But they were beating their heads and arms against a granite rock. Not once did an armed enemy stand for three seconds on the _Armstrong’s_ deck. Because Second Lieutenant Alexander O. Williams was killed on the forecastle, and Third Lieutenant Robert Johnson was shot through the knee and unable to stand erect, the defence on the forecastle almost failed. But Captain Reid rallied his victorious shipmates from the quarter-deck and charging forward drove the last boat from the schooner’s bow. Two of the enemy’s boats “which belonged to the _Rota_” were captured, “literally loaded with their own dead. Seventeen only had escaped from them both”--escaped by swimming ashore. The others, not less than fifty in number, were killed. Several boats were destroyed. “In another boat under our quarter, commanded by one of the lieutenants of the _Plantagenet_, all were killed save four. This I have from the lieutenant himself.” So says Captain Reid. The British officers admitted to Consul Dabney “that they have lost in killed, and who have died since the engagement, upward of one hundred and twenty of the flower of their officers and men. The captain of the _Rota_ told me he lost seventy men from his ship.” So wrote the consul in his official report. Afterward “the British, mortified at this signal and unexpected defeat, endeavored to conceal the extent of their loss.” In order to show American readers in what fashion British historians have handled the stories of the actions in which British seamen were badly defeated by the Yankees, the entire report which Allen wrote of this affair is here given _verbatim_: