As the night wore on, and the ship, with a very light wind, glided nigher and nigher the mark, Paul called upon Israel to produce his bucket for final inspection.  Thinking some of the spikes too large, he had them filed down a little.  He saw to the lanterns and combustibles.  Like Peter the Great, he went into the smallest details, while still possessing a genius competent to plan the aggregate.  But oversee as one may, it is impossible to guard against carelessness in subordinates.  One’s sharp eyes can’t see behind one’s back.  It will yet be noted that an important omission was made in the preparations for Whitehaven.

The town contained, at that period, a population of some six or seven thousand inhabitants, defended by forts.

At midnight, Paul Jones, Israel Potter, and twenty-nine others, rowed in two boats to attack the six or seven thousand inhabitants of Whitehaven.  There was a long way to pull.  This was done in perfect silence.  Not a sound was heard except the oars turning in the row-locks.  Nothing was seen except the two lighthouses of the harbor.  Through the stillness and the darkness, the two deep-laden boats swam into the haven, like two mysterious whales from the Arctic Sea.  As they reached the outer pier, the men saw each other’s faces.  The day was dawning.  The riggers and other artisans of the shipping would before very long be astir.  No matter.

The great staple exported from Whitehaven was then, and still is, coal.  The town is surrounded by mines; the town is built on mines; the ships moor over mines.  The mines honeycomb the land in all directions, and extend in galleries of grottoes for two miles under the sea.  By the falling in of the more ancient collieries numerous houses have been swallowed, as if by an earthquake, and a consternation spread, like that of Lisbon, in 1755.  So insecure and treacherous was the site of the place now about to be assailed by a desperado, nursed, like the coal, in its vitals.

Now, sailing on the Thames, nigh its mouth, of fair days, when the wind is favorable for inward-bound craft, the stranger will sometimes see processions of vessels, all of similar size and rig, stretching for miles and miles, like a long string of horses tied two and two to a rope and driven to market.  These are colliers going to London with coal.

About three hundred of these vessels now lay, all crowded together, in one dense mob, at Whitehaven.  The tide was out.  They lay completely helpless, clear of water, and grounded.  They were sooty in hue.  Their black yards were deeply canted, like spears, to avoid collision.  The three hundred grimy hulls lay wallowing in the mud, like a herd of hippopotami asleep in the alluvium of the Nile.  Their sailless, raking masts, and canted yards, resembled a forest of fish-spears thrust into those same hippopotamus hides.  Partly flanking one side of the grounded fleet was a fort, whose batteries were raised from the beach.  On a little strip of this beach, at the base of the fort, lay a number of small rusty guns, dismounted, heaped together in disorder, as a litter of dogs.  Above them projected the mounted cannon.