The Cayuga still leading the way up the river came upon a regiment at daylight encamped close to the bank, and Perkins, as the mouthpiece of the captain, hailed them and ordered them to come on board and deliver up their arms or he would “blow them to pieces.”

It proved to be the Chalmette regiment, and, surrendering, the officers and men were paroled and the former allowed to retain their side-arms, “except,” said Perkins, “one captain, whom I discovered was from New Hampshire.  I took his sword away from him and have kept it!”

Now Farragut came up in the Hartford and signalled the fleet to anchor.  This was near Quarantine, some five miles above the forts.  All the vessels had succeeded in running the gauntlet of their fire except three gunboats, and New Orleans was now practically at the mercy of the fleet; but the Varuna had been rammed and sunk in the hot fight with the enemy’s flotilla just above St. Philip.

The Cayuga had received forty-two hits in mast and hull, and six men had been wounded.

The hurricane of projectiles had passed mostly too high to do mortal harm to her crew, due in part to the skilful manner in which Perkins had sheered in toward the bank from midstream so early in the fight.

Resting until the next morning to care for the dead and wounded, and the repair of damages, the fleet again weighed, the Cayuga still in advance; and when the spires of the city hove in sight from her deck, “three rousing cheers and a tiger” went up from her gallant crew.  But the plucky little gunboat was getting ahead too fast, for arriving close abreast the Chalmette battery, which seemed to be deserted, she suddenly received a fire that compelled a halt.  Over-matched five to one, and having been struck fourteen times, with shot and shells dropping thick and fast about her, she slowed and dropped back a little with the current, until the Hartford and Brooklyn coming up quickly silenced the enemy with their heavy broadsides, while the Pensacola cared for the hostile works on the opposite bank in like manner.  The fleet then kept on without further obstruction, and arrived and anchored off the city about noon; finding the levee along its entire length aflame with burning cotton, coal, ships, steamboats, and other property the infuriated enemy had devoted to destruction.

The loss to the fleet in this daring and brilliant feat had been thirty-seven killed and one hundred and thirty-seven wounded.

It is needless to say that Lieutenant Perkins not only received high commendation from Captain Bailey and Lieutenant-Commanding Harrison, but won the praise and admiration of all on board and in the fleet, by the coolness and intrepidity shown by him in every emergency of the fight and passage up the river.

The first tidings received in Washington foreshadowing the success of the attack was through rebel telegrams announcing, “one of the enemy’s gunboats”—­the Cayuga—­“above the forts.”  Some question subsequently arose between Bailey and Farragut as to the Cayuga’s position in the passage, which in the diagrams accompanying the official reports contradicted the text, putting the Cayuga third instead of first in the van.  Farragut cheerfully made the correction.