We were very close in shore, and the cruiser was now trying to get in after us, so as to present one broadside to us and the other to the Polyphemus.
She gave her helm a turn, and was almost down upon us.
Simultaneously the Polyphemus, that wonderful vessel, releasing her false bottom, lightened her draught by several hundred tons, and seemed to spring bodily into the air, and was in between us.
But not before a shot from the Frenchman, fired almost point blank, struck our port upperdeck torpedo-tube.
There was a terrible deafening crash, and I was flung headlong into the water.
Then came sudden silence, the more intense for the raving turmoil that had filled my ears the moment before, and I went down and down, to an apparently interminable depth, till I began to wonder, in an impersonal sort of way, whether I were ever coming to the surface again.
But before I had realised it, I had shot up again, and my head was above water.
Heavily weighted as I was by my clothes and sea-boots, I struggled fiercely to maintain my position. But though I felt no pain, a sudden numbness had taken possession of my right leg, and vainly I attempted to swim or tread water.
Twice I had already gone under, when I found myself grasped by the coat collar, and a gruff voice shouted hoarsely in my ear, "Keep it up, sir, you're all right!"
It was Bates, the gunner's mate, who had managed, as he had so many times before, to escape unhurt, and had got hold of a spar. I grasped his arm and the piece of oar, and looked about me.