Leaving aside Lieutenant Gleig’s abominable stroll across the battlefield, the wretched dawn brought a new rain of hell from the Carolina, which by now had moved to the opposite bank of the river, well out of musket range, to continue unleashing her broadsides. Far from a mere harassing fire, it killed and maimed without warning, putting every redcoat’s nerves on edge. Worse for Keane’s army, by midmorning Carolina was joined by the much larger and more powerful sixteen-big-gun Louisiana—manned primarily by Jean Laffite’s expert Baratarian cannoneers—which anchored about a mile upstream and also began to blast the British positions. Captain Surtees recorded that one shot hit a corporal and went right through him: “He gave himself a sort of shake, and fell lifeless upon the earth.” Surtees himself nearly became a victim. “We had scarcely left a little wooden hut behind which we had taken our abode . . . when Bang! comes an eighteen pound shot right through the house, just at the very spot where we had a minute or two before been sitting.”
