“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.