It was a quiet night, not a breath of wind was stirring, but a confused sound was audible like that of small waves breaking on a stony beach. “What do you make it out to be?” he asked the quarter-master. “It is too irregular and confused for oars.”
“I don’t know, sir; it ain’t the sound of the oars of one boat or of two, but I should say that it might be the sound of a dozen.”
“I think you are right,” Miller said after listening for a while. “I don’t see what else it can be. Go down and call Captain Martyn.”
In two or three minutes Martyn was on deck. “You make out oars, I hear, Miller?”
“I am not sure that it is the sound of oars, but it may be.”
Martyn listened attentively.
“I have very little doubt it is that,” he said. “It is possible some boat may have gone over from this side with the news that we are here, or they may have arranged some fire signal and given notice in that way, and they have sent the boats of the fleet across to cut us out. Well, if so, we have got to fight; there is not a breath of wind. Call the other watch on deck, quarter-master.”
The men soon tumbled up.
“Will you see to getting the boarding nettings up, Mr. Miller. Mr. Tarleton, get a boat put in the water, ship a light anchor, and drop it a cable length of her quarter. Get springs into both cables, so that we can work her round and keep her broadside on to an attack. Horace, will you call up your father in the first place, and go down with the two Greeks to the lower deck and get all that mob of women and children down into the hold. Call the men to quarters, boatswain; open the magazine, get up canister and grape; let the men muster with muskets and boarding-pikes.”