University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
CONTINUED.

ERE long, a horrible explosion was heard, drowning
for the instant the cannonade. Two of the old
eighteen-pounders—before spoken of, as having been hurriedly
set up below the main deck of the Richard—burst
all to pieces, killing the sailors who worked them, and
shattering all that part of the hull, as if two exploded
steam-boilers had shot out of its opposite sides. The
effect was like the fall of the walls of a house. Little
now upheld the great tower of Pisa but a few naked crow
stanchions. Thenceforth, not a few balls from the Serapis
must have passed straight through the Richard without
grazing her. It was like firing buck-shot through the ribs
of a skeleton.

But, further forward, so deadly was the broadside from
the heavy batteries of the Serapis—levelled point-blank,
and right down the throat and bowels, as it were, of the
Richard—that it cleared everything before it. The men
on the Richard's covered gun-deck ran above, like miners
from the fire-damp. Collecting on the forecastle, they

continued to fight with grenades and muskets. The
soldiers also were in the lofty tops, whence they kept up
incessant volleys, cascading their fire down as pouring
lava from cliffs.

The position of the men in the two ships was now
exactly reversed. For while the Serapis was tearing the
Richard all to pieces below deck, and had swept that
covered part almost of the last man, the Richard's crowd
of musketry had complete control of the upper deck of
the Serapis, where it was almost impossible for man to
remain unless as a corpse. Though in the beginning, the
tops of the Serapis had not been unsupplied with marksmen,
yet they had long since been cleared by the overmastering
musketry of the Richard. Several, with leg
or arm broken by a ball, had been seen going dimly
downward from their giddy perch, like falling pigeons
shot on the wing.

As busy swallows about barn-eaves and ridge-poles,
some of the Richard's marksmen, quitting their tops, now
went far out on their yard-arms, where they overhung the
Serapis. From thence they dropped hand-grenades upon
her decks, like apples, which growing in one field fall
over the fence into another. Others of their band flung
the same sour fruit into the open ports of the Serapis.
A hail-storm of aerial combustion descended and slanted
on the Serapis, while horizontal thunderbolts rolled crosswise
through the subterranean vaults of the Richard.
The belligerents were no longer, in the ordinary sense
of things, an English ship and an American ship. It
was a co-partnership and joint-stock combustion-company

of both ships; yet divided, even in participation. The
two vessels were as two houses, through whose party-wall
doors have been cut; one family (the Guelphs) occupying
the whole lower story; another family (the Ghibelines)
the whole upper story.

Meanwhile, determined Paul flew hither and thither
like the meteoric corposant-ball, which shiftingly dances
on the tips and verges of ships' rigging in storms. Wherever
he went, he seemed to cast a pale light on all faces.
Blacked and burnt, his Scotch bonnet was compressed to
a gun-wad on his head. His Parisian coat, with its gold-laced
sleeve laid aside, disclosed to the full the blue
tattooing on his arm, which sometimes in fierce gestures
streamed in the haze of the cannonade, cabalistically
terrific as the charmed standard of Satan. Yet his frenzied
manner was less a testimony of his internal commotion
than intended to inspirit and madden his men, some
of whom seeing him, in transports of intrepidity stripped
themselves to their trowsers, exposing their naked bodies
to the as naked shot. The same was done on the Serapis,
where several guns were seen surrounded by their buff
crews as by fauns and satyrs.

At the beginning of the fray, before the ships interlocked,
in the intervals of smoke which swept over the
ships as mist over mountain-tops, affording open rents
here and there—the gun-deck of the Serapis, at certain
points, showed, congealed for the instant in all attitudes
of dauntlessness, a gallery of marble statues—fighting
gladiators.

Stooping low and intent, with one braced leg thrust

behind, and one arm thrust forward, curling round towards
the muzzle of the gun, there was seen the loader, performing
his allotted part; on the other side of the carriage,
in the same stooping posture, but with both hands
holding his long black pole, pike-wise, ready for instant
use—stood the eager rammer and sponger; while at the
breech, crouched the wary captain of the gun, his keen
eye, like the watching leopard's, burning along the range;
and behind all, tall and erect, the Egyptian symbol of
death, stood the matchman, immovable for the moment,
his long-handled match reversed. Up to their two long
death-dealing batteries, the trained men of the Serapis
stood and toiled in mechanical magic of discipline. They
tended those rows of guns, as Lowell girls the rows of
looms in a cotton factory. The Parcæ were not more
methodical; Atropos not more fatal; the automaton chess-player
not more irresponsible.

“Look, lad; I want a grenade, now, thrown down their
main hatchway. I saw long piles of cartridges there.
The powder monkeys have brought them up faster than
they can be used. Take a bucket of combustibles, and
let's hear from you presently.”

These words were spoken by Paul to Israel. Israel
did as ordered. In a few minutes, bucket in hand, begrimed
with powder, sixty feet in air, he hung like
Apollyon from the extreme tip of the yard over the fated
abyss of the hatchway. As he looked down between
the eddies of smoke into that slaughterous pit, it was like
looking from the verge of a cataract down into the yeasty
pool at its base. Watching his chance, he dropped one

grenade with such faultless precision, that, striking its
mark, an explosion rent the Serapis like a volcano. The
long row of heaped cartridges was ignited. The fire ran
horizontally, like an express on a railway. More than
twenty men were instantly killed: nearly forty wounded.
This blow restored the chances of battle, before in favor
of the Serapis.

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.

An officer of the Richard, seeing the mass of prisoners
delirious with sudden liberty and fright, pricked them
with his sword to the pumps, thus keeping the ship afloat
by the very blunder which had promised to have been

fatal. The vessels now blazed so in the rigging that both
parties desisted from hostilities to subdue the common
foe.

When some faint order was again restored upon the
Richard her chances of victory increased, while those of
the English, driven under cover, proportionably waned.
Early in the contest, Paul, with his own hand, had brought
one of his largest guns to bear against the enemy's mainmast.
That shot had hit. The mast now plainly tottered.
Nevertheless, it seemed as if, in this fight, neither party
could be victor. Mutual obliteration from the face of
the waters seemed the only natural sequel to hostilities
like these. It is, therefore, honor to him as a man, and
not reproach to him as an officer, that, to stay such carnage,
Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, with his own hands
hauled down his colors. But just as an officer from the
Richard swung himself on board the Serapis, and accosted
the English captain, the first lieutenant of the Serapis
came up from below inquiring whether the Richard had
struck, since her fire had ceased.

So equal was the conflict that, even after the surrender,
it could be, and was, a question to one of the warriors
engaged (who had not happened to see the English flag
hauled down) whether the Serapis had struck to the
Richard, or the Richard to the Serapis. Nay, while the
Richard's officer was still amicably conversing with the
English captain, a midshipman of the Richard, in act of
following his superior on board the surrendered vessel,
was run through the thigh by a pike in the hand of an
ignorant boarder of the Serapis. While, equally ignorant,

the cannons below deck were still thundering away at
the nominal conqueror from the batteries of the nominally
conquered ship.

But though the Serapis had submitted, there were two
misanthropical foes on board the Richard which would not
so easily succumb—fire and water. All night the victors
were engaged in suppressing the flames. Not until daylight
were the flames got under; but though the pumps
were kept continually going, the water in the hold still
gained. A few hours after sunrise the Richard was deserted
for the Serapis and the other vessels of the
squadron of Paul. About ten o'clock the Richard, gorged
with slaughter, wallowed heavily, gave a long roll, and
blasted by tornadoes of sulphur, slowly sunk, like Gomorrah,
out of sight.

The loss of life in the two ships was about equal;
one-half of the total number of those engaged being
either killed or wounded.

In view of this battle one may ask—What separates
the enlightened man from the savage? Is civilization a
thing distinct, or is it an advanced stage of barbarism?