In attempting this his vessel became entangled with the jib-boom of the Serapis and tore it away. The grappling irons were again thrown out, and the two ships again swung together, broadside to broadside, so that the muzzles of their guns not unfrequently touched, and the gunners, in ramming down the charges, often ran their ramrods into the portholes of their adversary. With his own hand Captain Jones aided in tying the lashings, that the vessels might not again be separated. Still there was not a moment’s cessation of the cannonading. The timbers were torn and rent. Huge gaps were opened in the sides of each ship. The cloud of smoke which enveloped them was so dense that the combatants, in almost midnight darkness, fought mainly by the flash of their guns.
A hundred men made a rush over the gunwales into the Serapis with gleaming swords, exploding pistols, and the loudest outcries which frenzy could extort. In such hours of blood and terror, shrieks aid to embolden the heart and nerve the arm. They were met by an equal number of the foe, with pike, sabre, pistol, and corresponding yells. What imagination can conceive the scene? In midnight darkness, illumined only by war’s portentous flashes, enveloped in sulphurous smoke, with the crash as of ten thousand thunders deafening the ear, more than seven hundred men, crowded together in closest contact, and wielding the most powerful weapons modern art could construct, were butchering each other. Limb was torn from limb. Dead bodies strewed the decks, which were slippery with blood. Shrieks and groans and prayers and oaths were blended with the horrid clamor. Can hell itself present a scene more infernal than this.
And who shall answer for this at God’s bar? If Abraham was right in arming three hundred and eighteen men to pursue the savages for the rescue of his nephew Lot, and his family, and if he could look for God’s blessing upon the enterprise, as he certainly could, then were these colonies justified in resisting, even to this direful extremity, the attempts of haughty England to enslave our land. The burglar who breaks into the peaceful dwelling at midnight, to rob and murder, may be justly resisted with every weapon which frenzy can grasp. The British government must answer at the Judgment Seat, for these scenes of blood and woe. Truly did Captain Jones write to Lady Selkirk.
“Humanity starts back from such scenes of horror, and cannot sufficiently execrate the vile promoters of the detestable war.
“For they; ’twas they unsheathed the ruthless blade,
And Heaven shall ask the havoc it has made.”
The boarders were driven back. Leaving many dead upon the deck of the Serapis, they were forced, pell-mell, over the gunwales, with many a gory wound, to the blood-stained decks of the Richard. As they fled, the two captains, each on his quarter-deck, stood within a few feet of each other. In the darkness the flags could not be seen. Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, shouted out:
“Have you struck your flag?”
“No,” responded Captain Jones, “I have not yet begun to fight.” With his own hands the intrepid captain worked, serving the guns. Though blackened with powder and smoke, and painfully wounded by a splinter, he was calm and unagitated, watching every movement, but with a firm expression on his almost feminine features which indicated that he would never, never yield. He endeavored to compensate for the superiority of the guns of his foe by the rapidity of his own fire. His guns thus became greatly heated, and in their terrible rebound threatened to break from their fastenings. At every discharge his ship trembled from stem to stern. In Captain Jones’s extremely modest official account, in which not one word is said in praise of himself, he writes:
“I directed the fire of one of the three cannon against the main-mast with double-headed shot, while the other two were exceedingly well served with grape and canister shot to silence the enemy’s musketry, and clear her decks, which was at last effected. The enemy were, as I have since understood, on the instant for calling for quarter, when the cowardice or treachery of three of my under officers induced them to call to the enemy. The English commodore asked me if I demanded quarter, and, I having answered him in the most determined negative, they renewed the battle with double fury. They were unable to stand the deck, but the fire of their cannon, especially the lower battery, which was entirely formed of eighteen-pounders, was incessant. Both ships were set on fire in various places, and the scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language. To account for the timidity of my three under officers (I mean the gunner, the carpenter, and the master-at-arms), I must observe that the two first were slightly wounded, and as the ship had received various shots under water, and one of the pumps being shot away, the carpenter expressed his fear that she would sink, and the other two concluded that she was sinking, which occasioned the gunner to run aft on the poop, without my knowledge, to strike the colors; fortunately for me, a cannon-ball had done that before, by carrying away the ensign staff; he was, therefore, reduced to the necessity of sinking—as he supposed—or of calling for quarter, and he preferred the latter.”