“Here, one of you,” he shouted to the midshipmen, who were grouped on the other side of the wheel, staring with all their eyes at the approaching ship, “whip that binnacle lamp out and show it.”
Kennet sprang to the compass-stand, unshipped the light, vaulted on to the grating, and there stood holding, at the height of his arm, the will-o’-the-wisp spark of flame.
The pursuing vessel was doubtless much closer to us when I first perceived her than I should have supposed by the pallid shadow she made on the troubled darkness of the waters. I think it must have been in less than half-an-hour’s time from the moment of my sighting her that she became a huge, easy-distinguishable shape in the heart of our wake. You saw sail upon sail towering upon her in pale spaces, which glimmered as though she reflected a strong starlight. By this time the news had reached the cuddy, and the captain had come on deck, together with most of the passengers, and we stood in a crowd, watching, and waiting, and wondering; for not yet had the tall and rushing phantom astern of us offered to shift her helm, and to my young eyes it seemed as though she was bound to steer right into us, cleaving us to amidships, like splitting a log with the blow of a hatchet.
“What does he mean to do? There seems no look-out on board!” called the captain to the mate. “Show more lights, Mr. Johnson, and let it be done quickly.”
The officer delivered some orders in a sharp, eager voice, and in a few minutes three or four sailors came running aft with large lanterns swinging in their hands.
“She has the cut of a Yankee,” I heard the captain say to the mate; “her high bows and crowd of canvas forward screen us from her quarter-deck. Great thunder! is she in a madman’s hands? She will be into us, sir. Fire a rocket!”
These signals were kept somewhere below. A midshipman shot away like an arrow, and returned, and then up soared the thing, the fire of it hissing as it sped javelin-like into the flying thickness on high, where it burst like a flash of lightning, flinging a green radiance far and wide, and sailing in a ball of flame slowly over our mizzen-mast-head on to the lee-bow.
Almost simultaneously with the detonation it made, like the blast of a blunderbuss, we saw the head of the vessel astern falling off. As she rose foaming to the head of a sea, her flying jibboom went majestically rounding away to leeward of us, opening out the fabric behind into a ship of some fifteen hundred tons, with high black sides and cotton-white canvas of the Yankee swelling from the water-ways to the trucks. A sort of groan of astonishment and admiration, mingled with a deep note of the fear that had been excited, arose from amongst the crowd of us. Indeed, but for her putting her helm over, her long bowsprit and tapering jibbooms must have been spearing our rigging in another five minutes, and her sharp clipper stem grinding into our counter.