Broadside after broadside rolled and shrieked from ship to ship, as the air was filled with flying bits of iron.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
Travelling very slowly, for the wind was little more than sufficient to give them steering-way in the tide, the two antagonists drifted along for twenty minutes, at cable length (600 to 900 feet—about the distance of the 220 yard dash). But suddenly—Boom! an explosion sounded in the gun-room of the Good Richard. Two of her eighteen-pounders had blown up back of the trunnions; many of the crew lay dead and dying, the after part of the main gun-deck was shattered like a reed: Senior Midshipman and Acting Lieutenant John Mayrant—who had command of this battery—was severely wounded in the head by a fragment of one of the exploded shells, and was scorched by the blast of flame.
“Abandon your guns!” shouted First Lieutenant Dale, “and report with your remaining men to the main-deck battery!”
“All right!” answered Mayrant, as he bound a white kerchief around his bleeding head. “I’ll be with you just as soon as I give them one more shot.”
This he endeavored to do, but not a gun could be touched off. “The old sixteen-pounders that formed the battery of the lower gun-deck, did no service whatever, except firing eight shots in all,” writes John Paul Jones. “Two out of three of them burst at the first fire, killing almost all the men who were stationed to manage them.”
The gunnery of the Good Richard was excellent. Though her battery was one-third lighter than that of the Serapis; though her gun-crews were composed—to a great extent—of French volunteers, who had never been at sea before—in quickness and rapidity of fire, the shells from the American fell just as accurately as did those from the Britisher; pointed and gauged by regular, trained English men-of-war seamen. The roar of belching cannon was deafening. The superior weight and energy of the British shot began to tell decisively against the sputtering twelve-pounders of the Richard, in spite of the fact that they were being served with quickness and precision. As the two battling sea-monsters drifted slowly along, a pall of sulphurous smoke hung over their black hulls, like a sheet of escaping steam. They were drawing nearer and nearer to each other.
It was now about a quarter to eight. Wounded and dying littered the decks of both Britisher and American, but the fight was to the death.
“Luff! Luff!” cried Captain Pearson, as the Richard began to forge near him. “Luff! Luff! and let fly with all guns at the water-line. Sink the Yankee Pirate!”
But Paul Jones was intent upon grappling with his adversary. Quickly jerking the tiller to one side, he shoved the Richard into the wind and endeavored to run her—bows on—into the side of his opponent. The Serapis paid off, her stern swung to, and, before she could gather way, the Richard’s jib-boom shot over her larboard quarter and into the mizzen rigging.