the British commander was forced to strike his flag and surrender. It had been a desperate alternative for Commodore Perry to venture into a small boat and transfer his flag from one ship to another. By his personal action in thus rushing his own vessel in at the crisis and exposing himself to a fusillade from the enemy for several minutes before he could make any reply to it, Perry had won the battle for the Americans. He determined to receive the surrender on his original flagship, the _Lawrence_, at whose peak had been flying throughout the battle the words spoken a few months before by the hero for whom the vessel was named, the dying commander of the _Chesapeake_, “Don’t give up the ship.” Perry returned to the ship and the English officers came to him there. Each presented his sword, and in reply Perry bowed and requested that their side-arms be retained by the officers. The deck of the _Lawrence_ was covered with dead and wounded. On both sides the battle had been very hard-fought, and the loss of life, both of officers and men, was very heavy. Out of one hundred and three men on the _Lawrence_ twenty-two had been killed and sixty-one wounded. On both the flagships every officer save Perry was killed or wounded, even Barclay being seriously injured, and the loss on these vessels was probably four-fifths of the men disabled or killed. When the ceremony of surrender was over, Perry tore off the back of an old letter, and using his hat for a writing-desk, wrote to General Harrison, stationed with reënforcements on the Sandusky River: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop.” Perry’s victory was immediately followed up both by himself and by General Harrison. Within a week the remnant of the fleet was ready to convey land forces to Malden, where they disembarked on the 27th of September. The timidity and incompetence of the British general, Proctor, gave the Americans a great advantage. To the utter scorn of Tecumseh and his Indians, who were supporting the British, General Proctor evacuated Malden, Detroit, and Sandwich without a stroke in their defence, and retired along the road to Lake Ontario even before the Americans landed. With such a start Harrison thought that the English with their thousand horses would be out of his reach, but he prepared to follow them. This Proctor seems not to have included in the range of possibilities.