Up crept the pirate, the ominous black flag still hoisted, although, as the breeze had dropped, it hung down limp from the mast; and they could hear the chatter of voices on board her quite distinctly. Nearer and nearer she came—until the lieutenant could count every man that stood grouped on her flush deck.
There seemed to be sixty or seventy of them, and they clustered together, looking over the side of their vessel at their expected prey.
Nearer and nearer she still continued to glide—until the schooner was almost alongside the Hankow Lin, and not ten yards off. It looked as if the pirate was going to run them aboard!
“Now,” whispered the lieutenant again to the expectant Englishmen around him—“small-arm men reserve your fire; you at the guns, be ready to run them out. Now, men, altogether, drop the ports! Run out the guns! Fire!”
The concussion shook the ship to her centre, and a perfect hail of grape-shot was poured on the deck of the schooner, making long lanes or furrows through the ranks of the pirate’s crew, as if they had been mowed down by a scythe!
“Again, men; sharp’s the word. Load again, and give them another round. Quick! That’s right,” as a wild yell rose again from the crowded pirate. “Now, Captain Morton, one more round and then I shall board her on the weather-side. Load again as quickly as you can. Fire!”
The terrific shot-shower again swept into the schooner, which had remained in the same position, the first two broadsides having broken the sweeps and killed the men manning them; and before the pirates could recover from their surprise the guns had been loaded again, and the gig of the Hankow Lin, with Lieutenant Meredith and his chosen crew, not forgetting Mr Sprott, had dashed out from the ship and boarded the schooner on her other side, where they least of all expected a foe, and the smoke concealed the boat’s movements.
At the instant that the naval lieutenant jumped into her rigging with his men, another discharge of the Armstrong guns swept her decks, and the schooner, impelled by the calm, which makes floating surfaces approach each other on the water, ranged up alongside the tea-ship. At this moment, Snowball dropped from the forecastle of the Hankow Lin into the bows of the schooner, followed by Jem Backstay and half-a-dozen others.
Assailed thus on all sides—the lieutenant and his crew clearing all before them with a valiant cheer, which Snowball re-echoed with a terrific shout like an Indian war-cry, perhaps from some intuitive recollections of his native wilds on the banks of the Congo, in which the words “golly, take dat now!” could, however, be plainly distinguished—the attack proved a trifle too hot for the mongrel lot of scoundrels whom the pirate captain, or cut-throat, commanded; and they gave way instanter. Some died fighting to the last; some jumped overboard, preferring cold water to English cold steel; and the remainder, some twenty in number, who had escaped the murderous grape from the guns and the keen cutlasses of the blue-jackets, threw down their arms and surrendered, when they were driven into the hold, and the hatches battened down over them.
The fight from beginning to end had not lasted ten minutes; and the pirate ship was captured in almost quicker time than it had taken to overcome the original Malay gang on board the Hankow Lin.