While this smashing battery work goes forward, hammer and anvil, the Serapis’ twelve-pounders are tearing and rending the Richard’s upper decks, piling them in ruins. Every twelve-pounder belonging to the Richard is rendered dumb. Only three long-nines remain in service. These are mounted on the quarter-deck, under the eye of Commodore Paul Jones.
“Suppose, Mr. Lindthwait, you train them on the enemy’s mainmast!” he observes to the midshipman, under whose command he places the three long-nines. “Try for his mainmast, young man! It will be good gunnery practise for you; and should you cut the stick in two, so much the better.”
Midshipman Lindthwait serves his trio of long nines with so much relish and vivacious accuracy that he soon has the mainmast of the Serapis cut half away. Leaving him to his task, Commodore Paul Jones again takes his French marines in hand, uplifts their souls with a fresh torrent of anti-English vituperation, and keeps them to the business of clearing the enemy’s deck.
One of the nine-pound shot of the industrious Lindthwait, flying low, strikes the main hatch of the Serapis, and slews the hatch cover to one side. It leaves a triangular opening, eighteen inches on its longish side, at one corner of the hatch. Commodore Paul Jones has his hawklike eye on it instantly. He points it out to midshipman Fanning and gunner Henry Gardner.
“There’s your chance, my lads!” he cries. “Sharp’s the word now! Lay aloft on the main topsail yard, with a bucketful of hand-grenades, and see if you can’t chuck one into her belly. A few hand-grenades, exploding among their eighteen-pounders below decks, would go far towards showing these English the error of their ways.”
Off skurry Midshipman Fanning and Gunner Gardner, with three sailors close behind. A moment later they are racing up the shrouds like monkeys, two ratlins at a time. Buckets of hand-grenades go with them, while Lieutenant Stack rigs a whip to the maintop to send them up a fresh supply.
The five lie out on the main topsail yard, like a quintette of squirrels, midshipman Fanning, a bright lad from New London, getting the place of honor at the earring. The three sailors pass the hand-grenades, gunner Gardner fires the fuse with his slow match, while midshipman Fanning, perched at the farthest end of the yard, hurls them at that eighteen-inch triangle, where the hatch cover of the Serapis has been shifted.
Sixty feet below the hand-grenade quintette, Commodore Paul Jones is again dealing out profane encouragement to his marines, for their ardor sensibly slackens the moment he takes his eye off them. They do good work, however—these Frenchmen! Under their fire the upper deck of the Serapis becomes a slaughter-pen. One after another, seven men are shot down at the Englishman’s wheel. This does not affect the Serapis; since, locked together in the death grapple, both ships are adrift, and have paid no attention to their helms for twenty minutes. Still, it does the Frenchmen good to shoot down those wheelmen. Also, it mortifies the pride of the English; for to be unable to stay at one’s own wheel is in its way a disgrace.
While Commodore Paul Jones is uplifting his Frenchmen, and improving their small-arm practice, orderly Jack Downes, who has been forward to Lieutenant Dale with an order, comes rushing aft.
“Lieutenant Dale, sir, reports six feet of water in our hold; and coming in fast, sir!”