He discovered it to be a large ship, to leeward of him some six or eight miles; he knew her to be a man-of-war, by the squareness of her yards, and who, as soon as she saw the Maraposa, took another pull at the lee-braces, and put her helm a little more a-lee; but she might as well have tried to sail in the teeth of a tornado as out-weather the schooner, though the accuracy with which she maintained her distance and position proved her to be a remarkably fast sailer. Willis had no fear of the ship overtaking him, and held on his course; day after day, for nearly a week, the two vessels were in the same relative position, almost on parallel lines, but between six and eight miles apart; both under all the sail they could carry. On the eighth day it fell dead calm, and both the ship and schooner lay motionless on the smooth water.
The scorching beams of an equatorial sun rendered the heat insufferable, even on deck; but in the hold of the slaver the heat and the stench were absolutely awful! and the poor negroes, nearly frantic, were continually shrieking for water and air.
Their cries brought them small relief. The attention of Willis and the crew was too much occupied by other matters, to pay any more attention to the blacks than see they were secure; for as soon as the wind died away, the ship had commenced getting out her boats. Already had Willis seen three of them lowered over, and he felt confident the captain of the sloop-of-war intended attacking him with the whole strength of his crew.
One! two! three! more boats he counted, as they swung an instant in the air, and then dropped in the water. Aided by his glass, he saw the men hurrying down the ship’s side to man them.
But he knew it was a work of time and labor to row eight miles in the intense heat, and it was not until he had seen the launch, four cutters, and even the gig, six boats in all, pull round the sloop’s bows, crowded with men, and forming a line, stretch out toward the Maraposa, that he commenced preparations to repel the attack.
The force approaching was formidable, nearly an hundred men, and the crew of the slaver, counting all hands, even Willis and the cook, was barely half the number.
The schooner, acting only on the defensive, and being so much higher out of the water than the boats, made this disparity in numbers less to be dreaded; and the confidence Willis had in his men, and they in him, made the slavers feel secure in the result of the approaching struggle; and it was with a loud and hearty shout that his crew answered, when Willis called —
“All hands to quarters!”
“Open the magazine! Trice up the boarding-nettings! and stand by, to give those English fools h—l! for meddling with what don’t concern them.”
These orders were soon obeyed, and the schooner with her six caronnades looking through the port-holes, double boarding-nettings triced up, and her desperate crew armed to the teeth, with calm, determined resolution printed on their countenances, quietly watching the coming foe, was the personification of men “grown old in desperate hardihood;” fortified with the determination of resisting to the death.