We lit our battle lamps and hung them along under the rail so that they illuminated our deck, where we preferred to fight, because we knew every foot of it. We had about one hundred and twenty-five men on the “Leckwith,” Norton having taken the pick of the crews of the “Florence” and “Surprise,” while I was away, in order to be prepared for any contingency, and I had no fear that the pirates could come aboard fast enough to get away with us. The junk’s grappling iron held and as soon as she was clear of us we went ahead slowly. This drew the two ships together, which was what we wanted. As the junk swung around we let go our carronades, but we were at such close quarters that the slugs did not have time to scatter and simply ploughed small holes through the mass of men that swarmed her decks. We gave them a volley of rifle fire and met them with another as the ships came together. They rushed over the rail at us in a sulphur cloud. Then it was revolvers and cutlasses. The pirates resorted to their old trick of throwing themselves on the deck, as though killed or wounded, and trying to hamstring or disembowel us, but we were up to that game and were watching for it. We made sure that every Chinaman was dead when he struck the deck. Every blow was that of an executioner. In a few minutes, as it seemed then, though it may have been much longer, the decks were slippery with blood and I could actually hear it dripping through the scuppers into the quiet sea.
It was such a fight as one gets into only in years, perhaps only once in a lifetime. The butchery was dreadful but the excitement of it set one’s blood ablaze. Our men became demons. As they shot and slashed they shouted and sang. A disarmed Chinkie seized me around the waist and dragged me in among his blood-stained fellows, but we were so closely wedged together that they could not chop at me without striking each other and they never thought of stabbing me. Norton and the mighty Lorensen, swinging an enormous Chinese sword which he had taken from one of his victims, came to my assistance and in a twinkling I was free, with dead and maimed pirates piled up around me in a circle. I could feel sword cuts now and then but they seemed like pin pricks. All of us were so covered with blood that there was no telling whether it came from our own wounds or those we had inflicted.
“That makes us even,” I shouted to Lorensen, as I cut down a yellow devil who had crept up behind him, while he was busy with those in front, and had his knife raised to put him out of commission. A Chinkie who had lost his sword seized my empty pistol from its holster, pressed it over my heart and pulled the trigger. I let him go that far and then laughed at him as I backed away and cut his head half off. I saw Norton go down and fought my way to him, to find that he had only slipped in a red pool. He had been singing a loud requiem of profane abuse over those who met his sword and he resumed it where he had left off, hardly missing a note. We kept the pirates in front of us and steadily forced our way forward. Every time one of our own men fell it made us fight the harder. The Chinkies cut and slashed with all of their desperate savagery but it was impossible for them to stand before the fury of our men and, though they outnumbered us four or five to one, they finally began to give way. We followed them onto their own deck and piled them up on top of each other. Finally a lot of them took to the hold and the rest, perhaps a hundred of them, jumped overboard. Those that foolishly fled to the hold we treated to a dose of their own medicine. We threw their stink-pots down among them until the air was thick with the poisonous smoke, and closed the hatches. Some of them, gasping and blinded, tried to escape through the guarded gangways; the rest of them died in the hold. There was not a pirate left alive on the junk or on our own deck.
We looked upon our work and pronounced it good, but before we had time to congratulate ourselves or count noses to ascertain the extent to which we had suffered, we discovered a big steamer almost on top of us. It was the “Ly-ce-moon,” the flagship of Moy Sen’s fleet, and, though we did not know it, the old pirate chief himself was in command of her. We barely had time to refill our revolvers and get back onto the “Leckwith,” when she banged into us and made fast with her grapplers. She was nearly twice the size of the “Leckwith” and her rail was three or four feet above ours. We did not know how many men she carried nor did any of us care, for we were mad with monotonous murder; the bestial blood lust that comes from a glut of human butchery was over all of us. We were both exhilarated and enraged; stimulated by the quick work we had made of the junk, and furious at the revelation of the cunning trap that had been set for us. The junk was the bait. It was expected that we would attack and board her; that our boarding force would be overwhelmed by the hundreds of devils who were crammed into her hold, and while this fight was on the “Ly-ce-moon” was to come up on the other side and finish us off. It was shrewdly planned and if we had not been on our guard and suspicious of everything, we would have fallen into the trap, and delayed matters so long that when it came we would have had a fight on our hands which it would have been hard to win. As I reasoned it out, when we ranged alongside of the junk to size her up more closely, as soon as she came up with us, her commander, naturally thinking we were preparing to attack him, decided that the cunning thing for him to do was to throw his horde aboard of us instead of waiting for us to board him. He supposed we carried only our ordinary crew, as all of our extra men were out of sight, and figured that it would be an easy game for him, in which he stood to win a lot of glory with no chance of losing; for even if we should develop unexpected strength, the steamer would come up in time to make our defeat certain. Nothing but this turn of affairs, which was not according to the programme, and the fury with which our augmented crew went at the Chinkies, made it possible for us to render the junk entirely harmless before Moy Sen arrived.
When he threw his grappling irons we made them fast and, before he had time to think, or to see all that had happened, we were scrambling over his high sides, each man armed with a revolver in one hand and a cutlass in the other. The Chinaman, even when he is a pirate, has no rapid resourcefulness. When you “switch the cut” on him, or do anything in a different way from that in which he expects you to do it, he has to stop and figure it out and fix himself all over again. Moy Sen’s crew were prepared to board us, and when we made the offensive our defensive, and carried the fight to them with an altogether unexpected rush, they were so taken by surprise that they offered little real resistance to our invasion. But by the time we were all on board they had regained their senses and the fight that followed was even more savage than the one before it. There were no lights, except those under the “Leckwith’s” rail, which did us little good, and the pirates fired at us from hiding places about their well-known decks, which we could not make out until our eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. Our men shot and, when their revolvers were empty, slashed at every noise. In order that we might not attack each other we kept up a contemptuous chant of curses on the Chinese, counting time to it with our cutlasses.
The result was a repetition of what had occurred with the crew of the junk, but it required much longer to accomplish it. The junk had carried more men than the steamer, for it was planned that those on the junk were to do the brunt of the fighting and get us going before the others came at us from behind; but the first battle was fought on a well-lighted deck with every foot of which we were familiar, while the second struggle took place on a strange ship and in semi-darkness, which was lightened only by the lamps on our own ship below us and a few stars above, for the sky was overcast with clouds.
We strung our forces along the full length of the “Ly-ce-moon,” to prevent the pirates from getting behind us, and fought our way crosswise of the ship. One of the first things that caught my eye was the figure of a gigantic Chinaman in the afterpart of the vessel, who at first directed the fight and then took a large hand in it himself. It was, as I suspected at the time from the manner in which he had been described to me by Ah Fen, old Moy Sen himself, who had paid us the high honor of taking personal charge of the campaign against us. He was the biggest Chinaman I had ever seen and must have been a full-blooded Tartar. He was raw-boned and his face, of which I now and then caught a glimpse, was that of a fiend. He had tremendously long arms and every time he swung his sword he cleared a space. Lorensen and I, who were close together while Norton was farther forward, tried to fight our way to him, but we were held back by important business directly in front of us that demanded immediate attention. By the time we succeeded in working our way aft, the chief of all the pirates had disappeared.
Made more desperate by the annihilation of their comrades on the junk and inspired by the presence of their great leader, and his commanding and defiant shouts, the Chinkies fought with a grim stubbornness which I had never before seen them display. They made no noise about it but kept chopping away, sometimes aimlessly, but always chopping. The scent of veritable rivers of blood would have sickened us, and our tired arms, like those of our enemies, would have settled into a methodical swing, had we not been spurred on by one victory and the prospect of a still greater one. My sword was broken off at the hilt in warding off a vicious blow, but before another one could be struck I seized a fortunately falling Chinkie and held him in front of me, while his blood gushed all over me, until I had secured his sword, which I used as effectively as my own. In trying to hamstring me a half-dead pirate gashed the calf of my leg to the bone, yet I scarcely noticed it. I felt something trickling down my face and knew a glancing blow had laid open my scalp, but there was no twinge of pain. It was the same with all of the others. No one thought of his wounds unless he was disabled, when, if he had strength enough, he dragged himself to the rear to be out of the way. Nothing was in our minds but to fight and win. Had there been twice as many of the pirates the result, in the end, would have been the same, for it was not in us to be defeated that night. Gradually, but slowly at first, we got the upper hand of them. When the inspiring voice of their chief was silenced they gave way more rapidly and our men chased them over the side and rushed into cabins, deckhouses, for’c’sle, engine room, and stokehole, hunting out those who had sought hiding places, and putting an end to the continued danger of pot shots.
It was broad daylight by the time we had thrown overboard the last of the dead Chinamen and washed down the decks, after giving our own badly wounded men such attention as was possible under the conditions. We thought for a time that Moy Sen had escaped, but we found him, almost chopped to pieces, close to the after wheelhouse, with three of our men dead beside him. Except for his great size we would not have known him, but he was identified by Ah Fen, who was the only one on board who had ever seen him. We had twenty-one men killed and twice as many so seriously injured that a number of them subsequently died, and there was hardly a man of us who did not have one or more wounds of some kind. In addition to the cut on my leg, which was a nasty one and barely missed the tendons, and the scalp wound, which was not a severe one, I had a dozen cuts and gashes of assorted sizes and widely distributed. The point of a sword had ripped open my already scarred cheek and another one had taken away a souvenir from my arm. Norton had a long cut along his abdomen, which almost accomplished the intended disembowelment, and half of one ear was hanging by the skin. He also had many minor injuries, but neither of us was damaged beyond speedy repair. Lorensen, a mighty man in any position, who had sent as many Chinamen to join Confucius as had any of us, was one of the very few who escaped with only trifling scratches.
On the “Ly-ce-moon” were two teak chests, filled with gold and silver coin and ingots, silverware, jewelry, and precious and semi-precious stones, of the Oriental variety, apparently representing the most valuable portions of several stolen cargoes, and these I allowed to be transferred to the “Leckwith,” in preference to throwing them overboard. It then became a question as to what we should do with Moy Sen’s ships. There was some apprehension that if we took them with us we might run into a cruiser and be unable satisfactorily to explain exactly how we came into possession of them and what we were doing with such a large crew on a private yacht. We compromised the difficulty by scuttling the junk and putting a crew aboard the steamer. We went to Singapore, arriving there in the early Summer of 1876, as I remember it, to close up our business, and sold the pirate ship to our Chinese agents for a third of what she was worth. We also sold to them, for a small part of its value, the loot we had taken from her, but all of that money was divided up between Norton and the crew. I held to my promise and touched none of it. We retained about twenty-five of our best men, paid the others off, after dividing up a large share of our profits with all of them, placed the injured in a hospital, and headed for Hong Kong, where the “Florence” and “Surprise” had been ordered to report. On the way we stopped at a small, out-of-the-way island, landed all of our guns and most of our small arms, and, after covering them well with red lead and tallow, buried them in a deep hole, over which we planted a lot of young cocoanut trees. The “Leckwith” then became, in fact, a private yacht. We had no anxiety regarding our old friends, the pirates, for there was nothing we could not run away from.