“All ready aft!”
“Ready for’ard!”
The replies were uttered almost simultaneously, and I instantly gave the word “Fire!”
The three guns rang out as one, the triple flash not only illuminating vividly, for a fraction of a second, the boat against which they were discharged, but also revealing for the same brief space of time a second and similar boat a few yards in the rear of the first. Fatally sped those three terrible charges of grape. The guns had been aimed with such deadly precision, and discharged so exactly at the right moment, that the leading boat was literally torn to pieces; so utterly destroyed, indeed, that she seemed to have vanished instantly from the surface of the lagoon, leaving in her stead only a few fragments of shattered planking, and a broad patch of phosphorescent foam in the midst of which floated her late crew, a ghastly array of corpses, save where, here and there, some wretch, less fortunate than his comrades, still writhed and splashed feebly as the life reluctantly left his torn and mutilated body. The spectacle of this catastrophe, so suddenly and completely wrought, this instant destruction of some thirty or forty human beings, was absolutely appalling; and its effect was intensified by the extraordinary circumstance that not a single shriek, or groan, or outcry of any description, escaped the victims of our murderous fire. So dreadful was the sight that, for perhaps half a minute, the entire crew of the schooner, fore and aft, stood motionless and dumb, petrified with horror, staring with dilated eyeballs at the spot where the bodies, now all motionless, lay faintly defined in the last rays of the almost burnt-out port-fire.
But there was no time to be lost; another boat was lurking out there somewhere, in the impenetrable gloom; so, rallying my faculties by a powerful effort, I managed to exclaim in a tolerably steady voice:
“Load again, men, smartly! there is another boat out there somewhere, and she must be prevented from coming alongside at all costs. Light another port-fire forward, there!” as the man in the fore-rigging dropped the fag-end of the first into the water alongside and the blackness of darkness once more enshrouded us as with a pall.
There was, apparently, to be no more fighting just then, however; the crew of the remaining boat had evidently seen enough to completely damp their ardour, for the time being at least, for before the operation of reloading the guns had been completed, the splash and roll of oars in their rowlocks could be heard in fast diminishing cadence, conveying to our experienced ears the fact that our enemies were beating a precipitate retreat.
But the horrors of the night were not yet quite over, for, whilst we were busily preparing to hoist in the guns from the raft alongside and to get the ballast back into its proper place in the hold, a loud, confused, splashing sound was suddenly heard away on our starboard beam, and, on looking in that direction to ascertain what this new disturbance might portend, we saw that the water was literally alive with hundreds of sharks, distinctly visible by the phosphorescent glow which shone from their bodies, which were tearing and snapping at the floating corpses of the pirates, rending them limb from limb, and rushing off in all directions with the dismembered fragments as the monsters succeeded in securing them.
Such a sight was not calculated to inspire the men with any relish for the somewhat perilous task of going down upon the submerged raft and into the deeply-laden boats to sling the guns and ballast; but the work had to be done, and the boatswain and the gunner volunteering to go down first, we soon had the work well under weigh, finishing it satisfactorily off and bringing a toilsome night of labour to an end about two o’clock the next morning.
By daybreak all hands were once more astir, notwithstanding the arduous character of their previous day’s and night’s work; the anchor was weighed; and under short canvas, with Courtenay once more on the topgallant-yard to con us, and a leads-man in the fore-chains on each side of the ship, we cautiously felt our way to the northward and westward until, about seven bells, we managed to reach the anchorage which the feluccas had vacated on the previous day. A hurried breakfast was then scrambled through; after which the long-boat and the gig, under the command of Courtenay and the boatswain, with their crews fully armed, pulled away for the shore, to see whether they could discover anything like a dépôt, of which no sign whatever could be detected from the deck of the schooner.