When the British discovered the enemy, they hauled up for them.  Arnold ordered one of his schooners, the Royal Savage, and the four galleys, to get under way; the two other schooners and the eight gondolas remaining at their anchors.  The Royal Savage, dropping to leeward,—­by bad management, Arnold says,—­came, apparently unsupported, under the distant fire of the Inflexible, as she drew under the lee of Valcour at 11 A.M., followed by the Carleton, and at greater distance by the Maria and the gunboats.  Three shots from the ship’s 12-pounders struck the Royal Savage, which then ran ashore on the southern point of the island.  The Inflexible, followed closely by the Carleton, continued on, but fired only occasionally; showing that Arnold was keeping his galleys in hand, at long bowls,—­as small vessels with one eighteen should be kept, when confronted with a broadside of nine guns.  Between the island and the main the north-east wind doubtless drew more northerly, adverse to the ship’s approach; but, a flaw off the cliffs taking the fore and aft sails of the Carleton, she fetched “nearly into the middle of the rebel half-moon, where Lieutenant J.R.  Dacres intrepidly anchored with a spring on her cable.”  The Maria, on board which was Carleton, together with Commander Thomas Pringle, commanding the flotilla, was to leeward when the chase began, and could not get into close action that day.  By this time, seventeen of the twenty gunboats had come up, and, after silencing the Royal Savage, pulled up to within point-blank range of the American flotilla.  “The cannonade was tremendous,” wrote Baron Riedesel.  Lieutenant Edward Longcroft, of the radeau Thunderer, not being able to get his raft into action, went with a boat’s crew on board the Royal Savage, and for a time turned her guns upon her former friends; but the fire of the latter forced him again to abandon her, and it seemed so likely that she might be re-taken that she was set on fire by Lieutenant Starke of the Maria, when already “two rebel boats were very near her.  She soon after blew up.”  The American guns converging on the Carleton in her central position, she suffered severely.  Her commander, Lieutenant Dacres, was knocked senseless; another officer lost an arm; only Mr. Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord Exmouth, remained fit for duty.  The spring being shot away, she swung bows on to the enemy, and her fire was thus silenced.  Captain Pringle signalled to her to withdraw; but she was unable to obey.  To pay her head off the right way, Pellew himself had to get out on the bowsprit under a heavy fire of musketry, to bear the jib over to windward; but to make sail seems to have been impossible.  Two artillery boats were sent to her assistance, “which towed her off through a very thick fire, until out of farther reach, much to the honour of Mr. John Curling and Mr. Patrick Carnegy, master’s mate and midshipman