CHAPTER XVII.
THE SPAR FIGHT.
I had the morning watch, usually uneventful. I was standing on the quarter-deck and scanning the Grand Canal with the utmost care. We had been told the mode of attack employed by the revolutionists—not that they had always used the spar, for on one occasion the fifty insurgents had swum to the side of a vessel, swarmed upon its deck like rats, massacred the officers and crew, scuttled the hulk and departed. We were alert.
Suddenly I descried a ripple on the surface of the Grand Canal. It might have been caused by a sea monster, and I confess that at first I did not attach much importance to the moving object.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, however, it had approached so closely that I could detect the almost submerged heads of the swimmers ranged along both sides of the floating spar.
I hurried to the main deck, where the crew lay asleep, and awaking each man assigned him to his post.
Only the bravest were given positions in the small boats, because, unequal as appeared the struggle between the men in the water, armed only with short daggers, and the members of our crew, wielding heavy cutlasses in the bows of the small boats, there was a terrible feature about the fight to which I have not referred.
The Sargassons were born swimmers. They never went into the water without a weapon of some kind to defend themselves against sharks, and the Sargasson youth, with his double-edged knife, was more than able to cope with any one shark that might attack him. This savage monster of the sea, as is well known, turns belly upward before it seizes upon its prey. The mouth is located under the bottom of the jaw, and it cannot seize an object on the surface of the water without turning over. Taking advantage of this fact, the Sargasson swimmer waits until he sees the white belly of the shark in the water, when he dives resolutely and plunges the terrible knife into the vitals of his enemy. Of course, it occasionally happens that he miscalculates his distance, or the refraction of the water deceives him as to the exact location of the fish. In that case he pays the penalty of his miscalculation with his life. But the value of such experience with sharks makes the Sargasson a terrible enemy in the water.
By the time that the attacking party had arrived within twelve or fifteen hundred feet of our vessel the Kantoon had been awakened and relieved me of the command.
The boats were equipped, the paddles were in place, and the sailors with their cutlasses, crouching low in the narrow bows, were ready to do and die.