As the vessels were securely bound together, Jean Bart seized a boarding-pike, a brace of pistols, and, giving the helm to a sailor, leaped into the waist of his ship.
“Board! Board!” he shouted.
A wild yelp greeted these welcome sounds. As he vaulted over the rail of his own ship to the deck of the stranger, a motley crew of half-wild sea-savages swarmed behind him. They had cutlasses and boarding-pikes, and their faces were blackened with powder. Their eyes were reddened with sulphurous fumes and their clothes torn with splintered planking. They rolled over the gunwales like a huge wave of irresistible fire: pistols spitting, pikes gleaming, cutlasses glistening in the rays of the sun.
The captain of the Neptune lay near his own wheel, grievously wounded.
“Lay on, men!” he shouted. “Don’t let this French privateer beat us. We will be disgraced.”
But his sailors were no match for the onrush of these fiends from Dunkirk. They fell back like foam before a sea squall.
“Then down with our flag,” cried the captain of the Dutchman. “But, ye gods, how it hurts me to give the order.”
A sailor seized the halyards and pulled the ensign to the deck, and, as it fell upon the reddened planking, a wild, frenzied cheer came from the French privateers.
“Jean Bart, forever! France forever! Jean Bart forever!” they cried.
“Up with the French flag!” yelled Jean Bart, laughing like a boy. “Up with the white lilies of France.”