The wave was foam: there was momentarily no concertion, no detail. Chaos rose above order, anarchy above method, chagrined amazement above victorious triumph.
The surprise was complete. At both ends the Spanish line wavered. Here the counter-attack began more suddenly than in the centre.
Vytal at one end, Dyonis Harvie at the other, turned both flanks of the enemy. It was a manœuvre that gave the lie to chaos. Method lurked in the seeming madness. The Spanish cannoneers, having heard the sounds of a hand-to-hand conflict, at the first surprise rushed to their comrades’ aid. The culverins and minions, nosing the Admiral’s hull, were for a moment deserted. The impulse had been foreseen; hence the flank movement.
Vytal’s first tactic, bold and open, succeeded. Fortunately, the Madre de Dios was not a man-of-war, but only a Biscayan carack, transformed temporarily and diverted from her commerce between St. Augustine and Spain. Thus her ports were few, and the guns below deck, being inconsiderable in number, were easily seized to prevent bombardment. A score of English, pursued by the now witting gunners, gained the command of these pieces. In an instant the guns were spiked, their silence maintained with iron gags, their deep throats choking.
Harvie, with his men, defended them. Vytal returned to the bulwark. The Spanish cannoneers, finding recapture impossible, likewise joined the main body.
Then for a time mere carnal bloodshed followed. The steel sea had leaped back upon itself. The Spanish aggressors became defenders on their own decks. The ranks of both sides were broken. Each man fought for himself.
Here it was sword against sword; there pike and pike. Here pistols and arquebuses, mouthing each other, thundered spitefully at closest range; there a piece of brass ordnance on deck shone in the torch-glare, itself a flame that belched flame and shot out clanking chain-shot, gobbets of iron or missiles like dumb-bells—twin deaths. Here it was hand-to-hand, men glutting the lust of their inborn hatred by sheer brute force, weaponless; there a crimson poniard gleamed dully for a second, and a figure lurched backward to the slippery deck. Here, whirring, a garish firebrand fell to an upturned face and burned away the look of anguish; there a sword bled a shadow.
But strategy worked in silence and darkness. The first tactic of Vytal was answered by St. Magil. A man made his way to the bow of the Madre de Dios, shielding a torch. The wind favored his project.
There was a flash of light across the strip of water from prow to prow, a tongue of flame in the air, and the firebrand fell flaring to a mat on the Admiral’s beak-head. The man, cowering, watched it, safe in the knowledge that his vessel lay immediately to windward of the foe. Gradually the unnoticed fire spread to the bowsprit’s mat, and thence to the false stem of wood. At the same moment a number of chains and ropes were flung out like the tentacles of a polypus from the Spanish yards to the rigging of the Admiral. At the ends of these groping fingers, irons like talons grappled with halyards and naked spars.
The ships were locked in a death-grip.