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Page 67
But the drooping spirits of the English were suddenly revived, by an
event which crowned the scene by an act on the part of one of the
consorts of the Richard, the incredible atrocity of which has induced
all humane minds to impute it rather to some incomprehensible mistake
than to the malignant madness of the perpetrator.
The cautious approach and retreat of a consort of the Serapis, the
Scarborough, before the moon rose, has already been mentioned. It is now
to be related how that, when the moon was more than an hour high, a
consort of the Richard, the Alliance, likewise approached and retreated.
This ship, commanded by a Frenchman, infamous in his own navy, and
obnoxious in the service to which he at present belonged; this ship,
foremost in insurgency to Paul hitherto, and which, for the most part,
had crept like a poltroon from the fray; the Alliance now was at hand.
Seeing her, Paul deemed the battle at an end. But to his horror, the
Alliance threw a broadside full into the stern of the Richard, without
touching the Serapis. Paul called to her, for God's sake to forbear
destroying the Richard. The reply was, a second, a third, a fourth
broadside, striking the Richard ahead, astern, and amidships. One of the
volleys killed several men and one officer. Meantime, like carpenters'
augers, and the sea-worm called Remora, the guns of the Serapis were
drilling away at the same doomed hull. After performing her nameless
exploit, the Alliance sailed away, and did no more. She was like the
great fire of London, breaking out on the heel of the great Plague. By
this time, the Richard had so many shot-holes low down in her hull, that
like a sieve she began to settle.
"Do you strike?" cried the English captain.
"I have not yet begun to fight," howled sinking Paul.
This summons and response were whirled on eddies of smoke and flame.
Both vessels were now on fire. The men of either knew hardly which to
do; strive to destroy the enemy, or save themselves. In the midst of
this, one hundred human beings, hitherto invisible strangers, were
suddenly added to the rest. Five score English prisoners, till now
confined in the Richard's hold, liberated in his consternation by the
master at arms, burst up the hatchways. One of them, the captain of a
letter of marque, captured by Paul, off the Scottish coast, crawled
through a port, as a burglar through a window, from the one ship to the
other, and reported affairs to the English captain.
While Paul and his lieutenants were confronting these prisoners, the
gunner, running up from below, and not perceiving his official
superiors, and deeming them dead, believing himself now left sole
surviving officer, ran to the tower of Pisa to haul down the colors. But
they were already shot down and trailing in the water astern, like a
sailor's towing shirt. Seeing the gunner there, groping about in the
smoke, Israel asked what he wanted.
At this moment the gunner, rushing to the rail, shouted "Quarter!
quarter!" to the Serapis.
"I'll quarter ye," yelled Israel, smiting the gunner with the flat of
his cutlass.
"Do you strike?" now came from the Serapis.
"Aye, aye, aye!" involuntarily cried Israel, fetching the gunner a
shower of blows.
"Do you strike?" again was repeated from the Serapis; whose captain,
judging from the augmented confusion on board the Richard, owing to the
escape of the prisoners, and also influenced by the report made to him
by his late guest of the port-hole, doubted not that the enemy must
needs be about surrendering.
"Do you strike?"
"Aye!--I strike _back_" roared Paul, for the first time now hearing the
summons.
But judging this frantic response to come, like the others, from some
unauthorized source, the English captain directed his boarders to be
called, some of whom presently leaped on the Richard's rail, but,
throwing out his tattooed arm at them, with a sabre at the end of it,
Paul showed them how boarders repelled boarders. The English retreated,
but not before they had been thinned out again, like spring radishes, by
the unfaltering fire from the Richard's tops.
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