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What a contrast to the previous awful silence was there in the report of the guns, the rattle of musketry, the shouts of the officers, the cheers of the men, the crashing of spars and timber as the shot struck home, and the shrieks, and cries, and groans of the wounded! To these expressions of pain even the bravest cannot help giving way, when wounded where the nerves are most sensitive.
In this, the exertions of the zealous Diego Mendez were eminently efficient. He had been for some days preparing for such an emergency. Cutting up the sails of the caravel, he made great sacks to receive the biscuit. He lashed two Indian canoes together with spars, so that they could not be overturned by the waves, and made a platform on them capable of sustaining a great burden.
We soon discharged our cargo and began taking on board a very miscellaneous one, including a considerable quantity of spars to form the masts and yards of small vessels. The day seemed to me wonderfully long, indeed there was scarcely any night. Of course, we had plenty of hard work, as we were engaged for a large part of the twenty-four hours in hoisting in cargo.
A softly noisy chorus of sea voices kept rhythm to the swaying of the tall spars, and from somewhere out in the shimmering sea came the sob and suck of a broken swell over a submerged reef. A brown man stood at the wheel like a brown wooden figure, his arms and face vaguely illumined by the glow from the binnacle lamp. Forward the decks were silent and deserted, except in one spot.
In the launch on deck he found a basket which had been brought on board with vegetables. There were a number of broken spars and other fragments of wood, the remains of the boats which had been carried away. He began to lash them firmly together in a mode which a seaman only could have accomplished; and in the centre of the raft he had thus formed he secured the basket, which had a lid to it.
This brought the battery directly abreast of us, and less than a quarter of a mile distant; and I was waiting for the concussion of our broadside, which I momentarily expected would be poured into it, when the whole face of the fort blazed out into a line of fire; there was a deafening roar, a loud whirring sound in the air, a crashing among our spars aloft, two distinct and heavy thuds, telling that some of the shot had struck our hull; and then, as the mizen-topmast fell over the side, the fore- topgallant-mast following the topmast-head being shot away our whole broadside rang out at once, and we distinctly heard the crushing sound of the shot as it struck the masonry.
So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
Now I saw that the tide was on the turn, and that Halfden's ship my own ship, as I have ever thought her had hauled out, and her boats waited for the last of the crew at the wharf side. But Rorik's ship was there still, and her men were busy rigging a crane of spars as though they would lower some heavy thing on board her. Nor could I guess what that might be.
For that reason they at once decided to break it up; and then they cut out its masts, and much timber and planks of the upper works, which, with the yards and spars of the other ships, they lashed together and fastened, and made a great frame, which they put under the side of the ship to raise it more out of the water; for this purpose they then discharged from the captain-major's ship into that of his brother, which was brought alongside, all that they could of the stores and goods; and everything heavy below decks they put on one side of the ship, which caused it to heel over very much, and with the timber under the side, and the tackle fitted to the main-mast, they canted the ship over on one side so much that they laid her keel bare; and on the outer side they put planks, upon which all the crew got to work at the ship, some cleaning the planks from the growth of sea-weed, others extracting the calking, which was quite rotten, from the seams; and the calkers put in fresh oakum and then pitched it over, for they had a stove in a boat where they boiled the pitch.
"Perhaps, sir, he imagines that the 'Dart' is defective in some of her spars," returned the hasty old seaman, compressing his lips, with a look of wounded pride; "he may hope to escape by pressing the canvas on his own light-heeled ship." "Does that look like flight?" demanded Wilder, extending an arm towards the nearly naked spars and motionless hull of their neighbour.
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