There was no time for hesitation. Snatching up the iron-shod handspike, Jack rushed straight at the forecastle door. Just then the ship lurched far down and he was shot headlong, like falling off the roof of a house. He had the momentum of a battering-ram. The sentry yelled and drew his cutlass with a swiftness amazing in a sick man. His footing was unsteady or Jack would have spitted himself on the point of the blade. As he went crashing full-tilt into the man the impact was terrific. They went to the deck together and the handspike spun out of Jack's grasp. There was no need to swing it on this luckless pirate for his bald head smote a plank with a thump which must have cracked it like an egg.
Not even pausing to dart after the cutlass which had clattered from the lifeless fingers, Jack spun on his heel and wrenched at the heavy bar across the forecastle door and felt it slide from the fastenings. He tugged it clear and swung himself up to the roof to draw the bolts which secured the hatch. Rusted in their sockets, they resisted him but he spied a pulley-block within reach and used it as a hammer.
All this was a matter of seconds only. The pirates grouped amidships had been waiting for Ned Rackham's word from aft and they were muddled by this sudden shift of action. The other sentries stared in foolish astonishment. The brief delay was enough to let Jack Cockrell free the hatch. While he toiled furiously, several pistols and a musket were snapped at him but the flint sparked on damp powder in the pans and only one ball whistled by his head.
Out of the forecastle hatchway and through the door, the enraged sailors of the Plymouth Adventure came rocketing like an explosion. They stumbled over each other, emerging head or feet first, blinking like owls in the daylight but with vision good enough to serve their purpose. Their goal was the nearest stand of boarding-pikes at the foot of the mainmast.
But as they came surging on deck, they were not empty-handed. In the forecastle was a bricked oven for warmth in winter and for cooking kettles of soup. This they had torn to pieces and every man sallied forth with a square, flat brick in each hand and more inside his shirt. Those who were first to gain the deck pelted the nearest pirates with these ugly missiles. The air was full of hurtling bricks and the earliest casualty was a stout buccaneer who stopped one with his stomach.
Driven back in yelling confusion, the pirates found their firearms almost useless, so drenched had the whole ship been by the battering seas, but they were accustomed to fighting it out with the cold steel and they were by no means a panicky mob. The fusillade of bricks held them long enough for the merchant sailors to escape from the forecastle and this was an advantage more precious than Captain Wellsby had hoped for.
What the pirates required was a leader to rally them for attack. Quicker than it takes to tell it, Ned Rackham had raced along the poop and leaped to the waist at peril of breaking his neck. Agile, quick-witted, he bounded into the thick of it, cutlass in hand, while he shouted:
"At 'em, lads! And give the dogs no quarter!"
With hoarse outcry, his gallows-birds mustered compactly while those who had been in the cabin came scampering to join them. Curiously enough, Captain Jonathan Wellsby had been forgotten. He was left alone to handle the ship while the pirate helmsmen stood by the great tiller. To forsake it meant to let the vessel run wild and perhaps turn turtle in the swollen seas. And so the doughty skipper was, for the time, a looker-on.
And now with Ned Rackham in the van, it seemed that the British sailors were in a parlous plight and that their sortie must fail. Craftily the pirates manœuvered to drive them back into the forecastle and there to butcher them like sheep.