It was sickening to see her chopped up. The very broadside whose smoke I still saw might, I knew, be the end of Nathaniel.

Three of our guns let off together with a bellowing roar; then all the guns of the crescent went into action. Confined, as we were, in a narrow strait, between cliffs and tall pines, the thunder of the guns was like a helmet of sound crushed down upon us.

A thick fog of white smoke rolled out from the crescent to hang between the tumbling waves of the channel, whirling and eddying, driven onward less by wind, it seemed, than by the stupendous roaring of the guns—a roaring that shook the planks beneath our feet.

What the intention of the schooner might have been, I couldn’t tell. She may have thought to rake us all: then go about until her consort and the sloop-of-war could come to her assistance. Certainly she was passing across our front with all sail set and no thought of stopping, when the treacherous wind turned against her.

She swerved surprisingly into the north—then into the northeast. As if a blind crew had snatched her from the hands of those who sailed her, she came straight for the center of our crescent. Arnold jumped from the quarterdeck to join the men who pushed and milled about the sternmost eighteen-pounder. I would have gone too, except that Tom Bickford and Verrieul had gone with Steven Nason to help lay the guns, leaving the quarterdeck empty of all officers but myself. I did what I could to help the eight seamen working frantically at the four little swivels on our larboard taffrail. Amid the roaring of the cannon, the popping of those swivels sounded like puppies yapping at thunderclaps.

The schooner’s crew seemed impotent to bring her back on her course. On both sides of her, and dead ahead, the water boiled and spouted, hurled upward by the hail of shot. Our cannon smoke drifted down upon her, caught in her upper sails and blew along her deck. A gash opened in her mainsail, as if slashed by a vast knife; her canvas flapped in the veering wind.

She could have held no straighter course for the middle of our line if she had been drawn by a cable. Voices, shrill and piping amid the uproar, rose in exultation from our main deck. The swivel gunners tore at the ends of their cartridges with their teeth. The sweat ran down their faces, smearing the powder grains around their mouths into black daubs. I found myself tight-muscled and sweating with desire to see that black schooner blown to pieces before my eyes.

A covey of gunboats had come across the channel and opened all together on the Royal Savage. Their more distant bellowing joined with ours to make a diabolic din. I saw the Royal Savage’s fore-topsail lean: then crumple, swing down and hang motionless against her ratlins.