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An eighteen-pounder carronade was mounted in the frigate launch, and her crew were also armed with muskets; three other boats were armed with smaller guns on swivels, and muskets; and one with muskets only a wherry, pulling two oars. Everything was ready by ten o'clock at night, when Sir Sydney Smith pushed off from the frigate, taking the lead of the other boats in his wherry.
Cain, who was standing on the side of the carronade with his sword in his hand, raised his arm and struck the pirate a blow on the head with the hilt, which, whether intended or not, fractured his skull, and the man fell upon the deck. "Take that, babbler! for your intelligence; if these men are obstinate, we may have worked for nothing."
Bang went our carronade, but our friend to windward paid no regard to the private signal; he had shaken a reef out of his topsails, and wars coming down fast upon us. It war clear that old Blowhard had at first taken him for one of our own cruisers, and meant to signalize him, "all regular and shipshape," to use his own expression.
"Me shoulder that carronade and trudge a dozen leagues?" objected Jack. "I travel light and leave the ordnance with you." They insisted on his taking more than a third of the food but he refused to deprive them of the water jug. There would be streams enough to slake his thirst. It was an affectionate parting.
There was the roar of the great guns, the screaming of the carronade slides, the rattle of musketry, the groans of the dying, the shouts of his victorious sailors, the crash of the main-mast as it fell upon the bulwarks. Then the swift sissing ripple of water, the thud of the Araminta as she struck, and the cold chill of the seas as she went down.
"I wish we had a big gun to fire," exclaimed Billy, looking round in perplexity, as if he half hoped that a carronade would spring up out of the ground. "Could we not make a row somehow?" "I fear not," said Gaff despondingly. "Shoutin' is of no use. She's too far-off for that. Our only chance is the flag."
In spite of the deadly work of my grape-gorged carronade, our foe still outnumbered us, I reckoned, by three to one. Honour forbade my fixing it at a lower figure this was the minimum rate at which one dared to do business with pirates.
Accordingly, sailors learned to defend themselves, and the ship's armory was as necessary and vastly better stocked than the ship's medicine case. To point a carronade became as needful an accomplishment as to box the compass; and he was no A.B. who did not know how to swing a cutlass.
The carronade, hurled forward by the pitching of the vessel, made a gap in this crowd of men and crushed four at the first blow; then sliding back and shot out again as the ship rolled, it cut in two a fifth unfortunate, and knocked a piece of the battery against the larboard side with such force as to unship it. This caused the cry of distress just heard. All the men rushed to the companion-way.
I had jumped from the nettings, where I was perched, to assist in unbolting one of the carronade slides, when I slipped and capsized against a peg sticking out of one of the scuppers. I took it for something else, and d d the ring bolt incontinently. Caboose, the cook, was passing with his mate, a Jamaica negro of the name of John Crow, at the time.
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