The breeze was almost dead on and the tide was the stream of flood, the set of it already strong, as you saw by the manner in which the in-bound shadows of ships in the eastward shrank and melted, while those standing to the westward, their yards braced well forward or their fore and aft booms pretty nigh amidships, sat square to the eye abreast, scarcely holding their own. The frigate lay in a space of clear water at a distance of about a mile and three-quarters. Though the corner of moon looked askant at her, she hung shapeless upon the dark surface, a mere heap of intricate shadow, with the gleam of a lantern at her stern and a light on the stay over the spritsail yard.
The man who had been thrown into the boat sat up. He passed his wrist and the back of his hand over his brow, turned his knuckles to the moon to look at them, and broke out:
“You murdering blackguards! I’ll punish ye for this. If I handle your blasted powder it’ll be to blow you and your——”
“Silence that villain!” cried the lieutenant.
“A villain yourself, you drunken ruffian! You are just the figure of the baste I’ve been draming all my life I was swung for. Oh, you rogue, how sorry I am for you! Better had ye given yourself up long ago for the crimes you’ve committed than have impressed me. The hangman’s work would have been over, but my knife——”
“Gag him!” cried the lieutenant.
The fellow sprang to his feet, and in another instant would have been overboard. He was caught by his jacket, felled inward by a swinging, cruel blow, and lay kicking, fighting, biting, and blaspheming at the bottom of the boat. In consequence of the struggle four of the oarsmen could not row, and the other two lay upon their oars. The lieutenant, in a voice fiery with rage and liquor, roared out to his men to pinion the scoundrel, to gag the villain, to knock the blasphemous ruffian over the head. All sorts of wild, drunken, savage orders he continued to roar out; and I was almost deafened by his cries of rage, by the howling and shouting of the man in the bottom of the boat, by the curses and growlings of the fellows who were man-handling him.
On a sudden a man yelled: “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” and, lifting my eyes from the struggling figure in the bottom of the boat, I perceived the huge bows of a vessel of some three hundred or four hundred tons looming high, close aboard of us. She had canvas spread to her royal mastheads, and leaned from the breeze with the water breaking white from her stem, and in the pause that followed the loud, hoarse cry of “For God’s sake, sir, look out!” one could hear the hiss and ripple of the broken waters along her bends.
“Ship ahoy!” shouted one of the seamen.
The man in the bottom of the boat began to scream afresh, struggling and fighting like a madman, and hopelessly confusing the whole company of sailors in that supreme moment. The boat swayed as though she would capsize; the lieutenant, standing high in the stern sheets, shrieked to the starboard bow oar to “pull like hell!” others roared to the approaching ship to port her helm; but, in another minute, before anything could be done, the towering bow had struck the boat! A cry went up, and, in the beat of a pulse, I was under water with a thunder as of Niagara in my ear.