“Now is your time, Mr Roberts; let them have it, fore and aft!” I shouted.
“Pump hard!” cried Roberts to the men, excitedly. The handles clanked smartly; the
mate turned the tap of the jet; and in an instant a long thin stream of oil, ignited by its passage through the flame blazing round the orifice of the jet, poured in a flood of fire across the intervening space of water, and struck the proa fairly in the bows. To raise the nozzle sufficiently to touch the men was an action quick as thought, when it was so manipulated as to cause the stream to travel deliberately right along the entire length of the vessel’s rail, from the eyes of her to the taffrail. The effect surpassed my most sanguine expectations; that stream of fire, thin as it was, could not be withstood; and in less time than it takes to tell of it the deck of the proa was full of shrieking men, who, with clothes ablaze, and suffering Heaven only knows what extremity of torture wherever the fiery spray had touched them, were plunging headlong below out of the way of the dreadful missile. The helmsman had, as I expected, instinctively put his helm hard a starboard the instant that the jet began to play, with the result that the proa, instead of touching us, forged slowly past us to port, and so ahead, with little tongues of flame creeping here and there about her hull wherever the flaming oil had fallen; Roberts keeping the jet remorselessly playing upon her until she had shot quite beyond its reach.
“Thank God, we are well rid of that danger!” I ejaculated; “and, unless I am greatly mistaken, we shall get a breeze before any of the others are near enough to attempt the same trick.”
“Ay; and here it comes with a vengeance, too! Look there, sir, on our starboard beam,” cried Roberts. “Avast pumping there, you two, and run the engine away for’ard, out of the way. Stand by the braces fore and—”
A terrific blaze of lightning at this moment enveloped the ship in a sheet of living flame, which was accompanied by a simultaneous crash of thunder that was indescribably dreadful and terrifying by reason of its awful intensity of sound. It literally stunned me for a few seconds, so completely that I knew not where I was; and when I recovered my senses I discovered that the tremendous shock of sound had rendered me stone deaf, so that I was utterly incapable of hearing anything. Fortunately for us all, this deafness passed off again in a few minutes; but while it lasted I found it exceedingly inconvenient and unpleasant.
My first act, on coming to my senses, was to glance instinctively in the direction indicated by the mate, when a complete transformation in the appearance of the heavens in that quarter met my anxious gaze. The heaped-up masses of cloud had there been rent asunder by the power of the imprisoned wind, revealing a large and rapidly widening patch of clear sky, with the stars brilliantly shining in the blue-black space; while beneath it the water was all white with the foam of the approaching squall.
“Man the port fore-braces!” I shouted at the top of my voice—though not the slightest sound reached my ear—“round-in smartly, men; well there; belay! Stand by your topsail halliards, fore and main! Why, what is this?” as in moving I stumbled over something on the deck that felt like a human body. I stooped to feel for the object—for the lightning had entirely ceased since that last baleful flash—and found that it was indeed a body. Had some one been struck by a bullet without our having noticed it? I hurriedly called for a lantern; but before it could be brought the squall burst upon us in all its fury; and though I could still hear absolutely nothing, I know that the Babel of sound must have been terrific, for the wind smote me as though it had been a solid body, jamming me hard against the larboard mizzen-rigging, while the staunch little barque bowed before it until her larboard rail was buried in the sea and her maindeck all afloat as far up as the coamings of the hatchways. I shouted an order to let go the topsail halliards, and signed to the man at the wheel to put the helm hard up; but he appeared to have already done so, for—the coat that had masked the binnacle light having gone to leeward upon the wings of the squall—I could see him to windward of the wheel, holding the spokes in his grasp and bearing against it with all his strength. Catching my eye, the fellow pointed ahead and said something—at least, I saw his lips move—and, looking in the direction toward which he pointed, I saw the proa that had engaged us driving away to leeward, broadside-on, with tongues of fire clinging to her bulwarks and deck here and there, which, even as I looked, were fanned into a devouring flame by the furious strength of the blast that swept over her. It was evident that Roberts’s flaming jet had set her on fire.
But the barque was paying off rapidly, and had risen to an even keel by the time that we had brought the blazing proa well on our starboard bow, when away she flew like a frightened seabird before the gale, leaving the unfortunate Malays to a fate that, however dreadful, they had certainly brought upon themselves. Meanwhile, the topsail halliards having been let go, the yards had slid down upon the caps, while the topsails—being patent-reefing—had close-reefed themselves; so that, running, as we were, dead before the squall, we were snug enough for the moment; although there was a lee-shore at no very great distance, the existence of which occasioned me considerable anxiety.