"Nor I, nor I!" shouted the rest of the crew, firing their weapons in the air and then throwing them down. Trahern found himself abandoned.
"And you will disgrace yourselves by surrendering to a force ten times smaller! Men! Come to your senses, these are no ghosts."
But no power on earth could have induced them to attack the corsairs, who were already fastening their grappling irons to the ship.
"Then I will defend the vessel alone," said the captain despairingly and, seizing a carbine, he discharged it among the buccaneers.
No one was hit, for his own men had struck up the weapon and would not let him aim at the assailants the second time.
A moment later the pirates were masters of the King Solomon.
The crew dared not resist them; their reputation for being able to accomplish whatever they desired had spread so far that the trembling seamen fairly lost their senses when they found themselves in the presence of people whom they regarded as beings from another world, and, even when they outstripped them tenfold in numbers, did not venture to offer any resistance.
If it were not for the existence of documents which prove it, no one would believe that twenty pirates, in a boat, amid the raging of a furious tempest, captured a man-of-war which had eighty guns, two hundred armed men, and a brave commander.
The eleven ships in the harbor of Mydaw were only awaiting the cessation of the monsoons and the arrival of the King Solomon to sail against Barthelemy.