On the Maria were Commander Pringle and Sir Guy Carleton. On the Inflexible was the Lieutenant Schanck of whom Steven Nason had told us: the one who invented the centerboard. In the Carleton schooner was Lieutenant Dacres, destined to command some of England’s greatest ships, and Edward Pellew, who became Lord Exmouth, and destroyed Algiers and commanded all of England’s squadrons. Yet all these splendid seamen from the grand British navy, and all the German artillerymen in the gunboats and all their twenty-four-pounders, which were bigger than any gun we had, were not sufficient to silence Arnold, or to overwhelm this ragged rabble at whose head he fought—those sweepings of hell who had been worthless on land but had, in less than one short month, been pounded into usefulness by shipboard discipline.

How it was that Dacres and Pellew and every other man aboard the Carleton schooner escaped being torn to fragments by the incessant battering of our guns is more than I know. For an hour she lay there, broadside to us and within easy gunshot, a target for every gun in our crescent. We splintered her booms, shot away her running rigging, smashed her longboat, broke her gun-carriages, threw solid shot and grape shot against her until her black sides were scarred from stem to stern with yellow pock-marks.

Up and down behind our guns went Arnold, a demon of energy. His face was smeared with powder smudges; from his hat hung a strip of gold lace, ripped loose by a passing grape shot; his shoulder was crusted with a smear of brown, the blood of a gunner shot through the throat as Arnold crouched beneath him to sight a gun.

His biting voice, shrill and harsh, drove the gun-crews as though he lashed them with a whip. “Double-shot!” he told them. “Double-shot! Give her another! We’ve got her now! Hurry it up! One more, boys! Double-shot! Don’t waste time! She can’t get away! Hurry, boys, hurry! Double-shot! Double-shot!”

Whenever one of the three sternmost guns was loaded, the gunner shouted, the crew fell back beside the gun and Arnold ran to the carriage, sighting and wrenching; giving the word to fire. As the linstock slammed down and the gun jerked backward, Arnold was off again: up and down, making jabbing motions with his fist: urging the gun-crews on: urging them on.

There was something about his violent determination that was catching. It was like a sort of flame, searing all those exposed to it. No longer were my nerves and muscles rigid with the expectation of death: I burned with an eagerness to see our shots go home against the black schooner. So hot was this desire that it parched my lips and tongue: singed my cheeks until they seemed half charred.