No more than twenty minutes had passed and the battle was won. The enemy was begging for quarter. One boat had been sunk, three had drifted away filled with dead and wounded, and the fifth was captured with thirty-six men in it of whom only eight were unhurt. The American loss was seven killed and twenty-four wounded, or thirty-one of her crew of thirty-seven. Yet they had not given up the ship. The frigate Endymion concluded that once was enough, and next morning the Prince de Neuchatel bore away for Boston with a freshening breeze. Those were merchant seamen also who held the General Armstrong against a British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is a story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated that it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader was a kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail coat. His portrait might easily have served for that of a New England deacon of the old school. No trace of the swashbuckler in this Captain Samuel Reid, who had been a thrifty, respected merchant skipper until offered the command of a privateer. Touching at the Azores for water and provisions in September, 1814, he was trapped in port by the great seventy-four-gun ship of the line Plantagenet, the thirty-eight-gun frigate Rota, and the warbrig Carnation. Though he was in neutral water, they paid no heed to this but determined to destroy a Yankee schooner which had played havoc with their shipping. Four hundred men in twelve boats, with a howitzer in the bow of each boat, were sent against the General Armstrong in one flotilla. But not a man of the four hundred gained her deck. Said an eyewitness: "The Americans fought with great firmness but more like bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats sword in hand and put every soul to death as far as came within their power. Some of the boats were left without a single man to row them, others with three or four. The most that any one returned with was about ten. Several boats floated ashore full of dead bodies.... For three days after the battle we were employed in burying the dead that washed on shore in the surf." This tragedy cost the British squadron one hundred and twenty men in killed and one hundred and thirty in wounded, while Captain Reid lost only two dead and had seven wounded. He was compelled to retreat ashore next day when the ships stood in to sink his schooner with their big guns, but the honors of war belonged to him and well-earned were the popular tributes when he saw home again, nor was there a word too much in the florid toast: "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of renown upon the character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of eternal bloom."