United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the Dannebrog drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke. Having neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and twenty-nine dead or wounded.
Alongside the Dannebrog throughout her fight with Nelson's flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the Elephant's side until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant. The name of Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken.
Willemoes was on leave serving in the Russian navy, but hastened home when news came of the burning of Copenhagen, and found a berth under Captain Jessen. On March 22, 1808, the Prince Christian, so she was popularly called, hunting a British frigate that was making Danish waters insecure, met in the Kattegat the Stately and the Nassau, each like herself of sixty-eight guns.
Young Willemoes was spared the grief of seeing the last Danish man-of-war strike its flag. In the hottest of the fight, as he jumped upon a gun the better to locate the enemy in the gloom, a cannon-ball took off the top of his head. He fell into the arms of a fellow officer with the muttered words, "Oh God! my head my country!" and was dead.
Word Of The Day