“It took some time to train the gun aft, and by this time the line-of-battle ship had cleared the channel, and was putting up her helm to follow us. The old skipper laid his pet gun himself, and squinted, and squinted over her breech, and elevated, and depressed, and trained to the right, and trained to the left, till we thought he never meant to twitch the lanyard at all. Crack went Mjölner. By this time we had pretty nearly got the line-of-battle ship’s three masts in one, and the shot striking just under the fore top-mast cross-trees, cut the topsail tie and the jib halyards at once; down rattled the yard, snapping the fore top gallant sheets, out flew the top gallant sail, and away went the jib dragging under her fore-foot; and up flew the ship herself into the wind again, letting drive her broadside at us, as if she had done it on purpose.
“The old skipper sent his steward for some bottles of true Cognac, and gave the men a tot all round, to drink Mjölner’s health.
“The enemy had brailed up her driver, and braced by her after-sails, and got before the wind again in no time; and was not much longer in bending on a new tie and splicing her halyards; but we had got pretty well out of range now, and were bobbing in and out among a cluster of rocks as thick as porpoises. We had a man at the flying jib-boom as a look-out, and a couple more on the spritsail yardarms (for our ships had not whiskers in those days), and it was nothing but ‘Breakers ahead!’ ‘Rock on the port bow!’ ‘A reef to starboard!’ for the next quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, enough to make one’s hair stand on end. A-ha! thought I, when the last of them showed clear on the quarter, this is the skipper’s trap; here’s where the old Dictator is going to lay her bones! But she did not. She dodged through every one of them every bit as well as we had done, and there certainly was no doubt but that the distance between us was a good deal decreased. These tubs of fifties sail like a haystack on a wind, but before it they go like Skidbladner herself.
“Old Hulm began to look grave; he had never dreamt of her following him within the islands like that, and he began to ‘smell a rat.’ The frigate had been caught on her very worst point of sailing. We might easily have worked to windward at first, but now she had got us fairly under her lee, and if we tried to tack under her guns, she would have stripped us of every rag of canvas we could show. Mjölner came into play again, as well as the stern chasers on the main deck, and to good purpose, too; but, on the other hand, the English shot were flying like peas about us—and they did not always fall short, either. Now and then there was a rope shot away, or a man knocked over, or a gun capsized,—for, at that distance, every shot that hit us pitched in upon the deck and trundled forwards, hopping here and there off the bulwarks without going through them, like so many billiard balls.
“‘I will tell you what,’ says Hulm, ‘I will shove her through the Lyngör Channel, there is a rock in the middle that it will be as much as we can do to shave ourselves, and if we do get past it, the chances are, that it will bring up the liner; it is a desperate chance, but we must try it, and if the Englishman does get through after us (which she will not), we will reach out into the offing as close to the wind as we can lie. Port your helm at once, Mr. Sinklar—drop your main course, and haul out the driver.’
“Up she came to the wind again, but the main-sail, which had been clewed up while we were running, had got a shot through it, exactly where the bunt-line gathered it into a bundle. The shot had gone through fold after fold of the canvas, cutting the foot-rope also, and before the tack was well hauled down, the sail had split from top to bottom; and then, just as she drew in under cover of the land, the mizen top-mast came clattering about our ears.
“It was all up for beating to windward, unless we could shift our top-mast in time, and this the enemy was too close upon us to allow us do; everything lay on the rock bringing her up, and as I looked over the side as we passed, the rugged points looked so close to our own bends, that I thought they must have gone through; and the liner drew more water than we did.
“All eyes were turned on the English ship, at least, on her sails, for a point of land concealed her hull, and prevented our firing; every moment we expected to see her sheets let fly;—not a bit of it,—on she came as steadily as ever.
“Just at the village of Lyngör the channel turns at right angles, and the islands that form it, being high, took the wind out of our courses; while we had been running it had drawn a little to the southward of west,—which, as we had been off the wind all day, we had not taken notice of—as we turned the angle it headed us. Whether, under any circumstances, we could have fetched clear of the northern cape is doubtful; without our mizen top-sail it was impossible, for as the courses were becalmed, we really carried nothing but head sail that would draw; and in fact, we could scarcely look up for the cape, much less weather it.