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Chapter VI - Perry Meets The Enemy
Perry Meets The Enemy 1813
The U.S. Navy provided the only bright spot for America during the dark and unsettling events of 1812. Led by twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Hazzard Perry, already a fourteen-year veteran, the Navy challenged British vessels at Lake Erie's Put-in-Bay on September 10, 1813. Before the attack Perry earnestly confided to his aide, "This is the most important day of my life." The day began badly, however. Taking advantage of their superior firepower, the British warships Detroit and Queen Charlotte pummeled Perry's flagship, the Lawrence. After the battle, American sailors told of how the blood flowed so freely on deck that shipmates "slipped and fell as they wrestled with the cannon." Even after four hours of intense shelling with eighty percent of the crew dead or wounded and none of their guns workings the Americans on board the Lawrence kept fighting. Leaving the Lawrence in a rowboat, Perry, his four brothers and four sailors boarded another American ship, the Niagara, and persisted in ferociously battling the British vessels. With guns blazing, Perry's decimated forces headed directly toward the Detroit and the Queen Charlotte, forcing them to "strike their colors," in a sign of surrender. His hat serving as a table, Perry scrawled a message to General William Henry Harrison on the back of an envelope, triumphantly informing him, "We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop."
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