“Musketeers to the prow!”

The musketeers, at their station at the waist, obeyed him with the speed of men who know that in obedience is the only hope of life.  Fifty of them dashed forward instantly, and from the ruins of the forecastle they blazed over the heads of Hayton’s men, mowing down the French soldiers who, unable to dislodge the irons, firmly held where they had deeply bitten into the timbers of the Victorieuse, were themselves preparing to fire upon the grapnel crew.

Starboard to starboard the two ships swung against each other with a jarring thud.  By then Blood was down in the waist, judging and acting with the hurricane speed the occasion demanded.  Sail had been lowered by slashing away the ropes that held the yards.  The advance guard of boarders, a hundred strong, was ordered to the poop, and his grapnel-men were posted, and prompt to obey his command at the very moment of impact.  As a result, the foundering Arabella was literally kept afloat by the half-dozen grapnels that in an instant moored her firmly to the Victorieuse.

Willoughby and van der Kuylen on the poop had watched in breathless amazement the speed and precision with which Blood and his desperate crew had gone to work.  And now he came racing up, his bugler sounding the charge, the main host of the buccaneers following him, whilst the vanguard, led by the gunner Ogle, who had been driven from his guns by water in the gun-deck, leapt shouting to the prow of the Victorieuse, to whose level the high poop of the water-logged Arabella had sunk.  Led now by Blood himself, they launched themselves upon the French like hounds upon the stag they have brought to bay.  After them went others, until all had gone, and none but Willoughby and the Dutchman were left to watch the fight from the quarter-deck of the abandoned Arabella.

For fully half-an-hour that battle raged aboard the Frenchman.  Beginning in the prow, it surged through the forecastle to the waist, where it reached a climax of fury.  The French resisted stubbornly, and they had the advantage of numbers to encourage them.  But for all their stubborn valour, they ended by being pressed back and back across the decks that were dangerously canted to starboard by the pull of the water-logged Arabella.  The buccaneers fought with the desperate fury of men who know that retreat is impossible, for there was no ship to which they could retreat, and here they must prevail and make the Victorieuse their own, or perish.

And their own they made her in the end, and at a cost of nearly half their numbers.  Driven to the quarter-deck, the surviving defenders, urged on by the infuriated Rivarol, maintained awhile their desperate resistance.  But in the end, Rivarol went down with a bullet in his head, and the French remnant, numbering scarcely a score of whole men, called for quarter.