“Hoist the Union Jack, Snowball,” said the lieutenant to the darky, who had done so much to gain the victory—seeing him with the flag in his hand, and apparently itching to haul it up. “Hoist away, darky, and let us have honest colours over that dirty black rag! Now, lads, three cheers!”
“Lord bless you!” as Bill the boatswain said to his wife when telling her the story of the pirate’s repulse when he got home some time afterwards, safe and sound, as luck would have it, “you oughter have just heard the shout that then went up from our throats to heaven! It sounded a’most like thunder; it were louder nor the report of the Armstrong guns as peppered the varmint!”
Volume One--Chapter Six.
“All’s well that ends well.”
To make a long story short, I may state briefly that in the second part of the action—the second act of a tragedy, it was for the Malays—both the bluejackets and the men of the Hankow Lin got off scot-free, not another casualty happening to swell the death-roll, or a fresh wound of any consequence being received by any of those engaged. The surprise to the pirates on finding they had “caught a Tartar,” instead of assailing a defenceless merchant vessel, as they had expected, was so complete, that, in nautical phraseology, they were “taken all aback.”
Not expecting any opposition to speak of, and confident that the ship they were attacking carried no guns—for how could even the most astute of the Malays have supposed, with all their prying and peeping, that the Hankow Lin had a set of Armstrongs on board her, headed up in hogsheads?—the pirates were stupefied by the first broadside they received; and, after that, their resistance amounted to nil, especially the more as one of the discharges killed their chief, when, of course, they had no one to lead them on or rally their drooping energies on the pinch.
The schooner, it was found, was none other than the Diavolo, a pirate craft commanded by a Portuguese renegade, who had already earned for himself a somewhat questionable reputation in Eastern seas; and how Captain Morton got wind of the intentions of the Malay crew to mutiny and bring his ship for destruction may be thus briefly told:—
Several large tea-traders having mysteriously disappeared on their voyage home to England, after shipping Malay crews on board, the English admiral on the station had conferred with the Chinese authorities, and from them learned that the Diavolo was suspected, and that a spy had discovered that an attempt would be made on the Hankow Lin, which was just loading at the time, and which had, like the other missing ships, shipped some Malay hands, in consequence of the loss of the main portion of her English crew on the voyage out.