“Eh, Jack, old trump! What say you to quitting?” he cries.
“Why! as to surrenderin’, Commodore,” says Boatswain Jack Robinson, refreshing himself with a huge chew of tobacco, “I’m for sinkin’ alongside an’ seein’ ‘em damned first! Sink alongside, says I; an’ if the grapplin’ tackle holds, we’ll take ‘em with us to Davy Jones, d’ye see! An’ that’ll be a comfort!”
“There’s the heart of oak!” returns Commodore Paul Jones, in vast approval of Boatswain Jack Robinson’s turgid views; “and when we’re next ashore in New London, old shipmate, I’ll tell Polly all about it. Meanwhile, our ensign’s trailing astern. Set it aboard by the halyards, fish and splice the gaff, and put it back in its place. Give the Englishmen a sight of that red, white and blue flag, Jack; it takes the fight out of ‘em.”
“Ay, ay, sir!” responds Boatswain Jack Robinson, as he begins the task of recovering and replacing the ensign. “That flag does seem to let the whey out of a Britisher.”
This is gratuitous slander on the parts of both Commodore Paul Jones and Boatswain Jack Robinson; for those villified ones have been fighting for hours, and are still at it with the quenchless valor of so many mastiffs.
There is that at hand, however, that will daunt their iron courage and feed even their stout hearts to dismay. High up at the weather earring of the Richard’s main topsail yard, Midshipman Fanning has been faithfully practicing with hand-grenades at that inviting triangular hole, where the hatch-cover of the Serapis was shot-slewed to one side. It is not an easy mark, that black, three-cornered hole, and thus far Midshipman Fanning has missed. It is now that success crowns his work; a smoking, spitting hand-grenade goes cleanly through, and fetches up on the Serapis’s lower gun deck. The explosion instantly occurs; it is as though the fuse were carefully timed for it.
If this were all it would be bad enough, but worse comes with it. There are scores of cartridges cumbering the deck to the rear of the batteries; for the powder monkeys of the Serapis, earning their pay and allowances, have been bringing powder from the magazines much faster than the gunners can burn it in their eighteen-pounders. The exploding hand-grenade sets off this powder. There is a blinding sheet of flame; a report like smothered thunder; the deck of the Serapis is all but torn from its timbers! Fifty of the crew are killed or crippled, while the slewed hatch-cover is blown overboard. No trouble now to hit that yawning black hatchway. With such a target there can be no talk of missing, and Midshipman Fanning and gunner Gardner, from their high perch on the main topsail yard, fill the stomach of the Serapis with a bursting, death-dealing shower. And so the end comes tapping at the door.
Lieutenant Mayrant, with his boarding party, stands waiting the signal. Commodore Paul Jones notes the devastation wrought by Midshipman Fanning’s hand-grenades.
“Boarders away!” he cries.
Lieutenant Mayrant and his men go swarming over the hammock nettings of the Serapis, the red Indian port-fire, Anthony Jeremiah, among the foremost.