“Then, gentlemen,” said Hardy, with unusual animation, as he waved his right arm aloft with an imaginary cutlass swinging over his head, “came the word ‘Fire!’
“Yes, the entire starboard broadside, round shot, grape, and canister, all pointed toward a centre, were delivered with one simultaneous shock––the hurricane a mere cat’s-paw in comparison––which shook the corvette as if she had struck a rock, while the smoke and sheets of flame spouted out from the cannon, half hiding the black torrent which gushed forth from so many hoarse throats; and as the roar of the concussion was taken up in terrible echoes from the lion on the rock, a peppering volley of musket-balls from the marines on the poop and forecastle made a barking tenor to the music.
“Meanwhile the helm of the ‘Scourge’ was hove hard down, and as she just swirled, by a miracle, clear of the ledge under our lee, and came up to the wind with the sails slamming and banging hard enough to send the canvas out of the bolt-ropes, the courses were clewed up, every thing aloft came down by the run; anchor after anchor went plunging to the bottom, and before the cables had fairly begun to fly out of the hawse-holes with their infernal jar and rattle, high above the sounds of flapping sails, snapping blocks, running chains, and what not, came another clear order, ‘Fire!’
“Then pealed out the port broadside at a helpless, dismasted hulk within two hundred yards of our beam, rolling like a worm-eaten log on the top of a ruffled broad roller, going to break, in ten seconds, on the ledge, whose pointed rocks stood up like black toothed fangs 225 to grind its prey to atoms! But before the fangs closed upon it our own teeth gave it a shake; and as the breath of our bull-dogs was swept aft by the fresh breeze, we could see the sluggish mass almost rise bodily out of water as it was torn and split by the round iron wedges, the fragments flying up in dark, ragged strips and splinters with squirming ropes around them, looking, in the moonlight, like skeletons of gibbeted pirates tossed, gallows and chains, into the air, and then coming down in dips and splashes into the unforgiving water.
“A minute later, all that was left of the shattered hull fell broadside into the open fangs of the ledge, which ground it with its merciless jaws into toothpicks. But in all the lively music and destruction going on around us––which takes longer to tell than to act––we heard no human voice save one, and that came in a loud, terrified yell amid the crunching roar of the ledge,
“‘O Madre! Madre dolorosa!’
“This, gentlemen, was the last sound that came from the piratical schooner ‘Centipede.’”