Neither side, certainly, lost any time in beginning. The sturdy Hollanders did not wait even for a summons to surrender. The foremost English ship had barely dropped her anchor in front of the Zwart Steen Battery, when there was a red flash from the old gray wall, a loud bang, and then a cannon-ball came tearing through the foretopsail, and splashed into the water far beyond. Bang went the Englishman’s whole broadside in return, and the balls were heard rattling among the rocks, or crashing into the front of the breastwork; and now the fight began in earnest.
Fire, smoke, flying shot, crashing timbers, deafening uproar, multiplied a thousand-fold by the echoes of the surrounding hills—it was a hard fight, for there were Dutchmen behind those batteries who had swept the Channel with Van Tromp, and there were Englishmen aboard those ships who had fought him and his men, yardarm to yardarm, under Robert Blake; and it would have been hard to tell which were the braver or the more stubborn of the two.
“Fire away, boys, for the honor of Old England!” shouted Captain Richard Munden, pacing up and down the quarter-deck of the British flagship amid a hail of shot.
“Stand to it, my sons, as if Father Van Tromp were with you still!” cried the brave old Dutch commandant, Pieter Van Gebhardt, as he leveled a gun with his own hands over the fast-crumbling parapet. “Fear not for the fire and smoke; it is but the Englishman lighting his pipe.”
Both sides fought stoutly, and men began to fall fast; but it seemed as if on the whole the Dutch were getting the best of it. The ships, lying out upon the smooth water, made an excellent mark, while the rock-cut batteries could hardly be distinguished from the cliff itself.
But just at that moment a very unexpected turn of fortune changed the whole face of the battle.
To explain clearly how this happened we must go back a little way.
The Dutch garrison had given their whole attention to the attack in front, feeling sure that this was the only point from which they could be assailed. And they reasoned well; for everywhere else the coast was merely one great precipice of several hundred feet, rising so sheer out of the sea that it seemed as if nothing without wings could possibly scale it.
But they might, perhaps, have been less confident had they seen what was going on just then at the opposite side of the island.
When the English ships first advanced to the attack, the hindmost of them, while still hidden from the Dutch by the huge black pyramid of Sugar-loaf Point, had lowered several large boats filled with armed men, which instantly shot away round the great rocky bluff of “the Barn” as fast as eight oars apiece could carry them.