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The object which was exciting so much interest among the Spanish officers was a schooner broad on our weather-beam, about eight miles distant, and consequently hull-down from the deck.
I kept them hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery edge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good to me to drive ahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over the long black waves.
We were on a bowline under short canvas at the time, to the eastward of the Silver Bank, the tail of which we had cleared about an hour before, while the stranger was apparently hove-to dead to windward of us, and hull-down from the deck. There was not much to be learned by looking at the stranger from the level of the deck.
The Covadonga very soon ran the Huascar hull-down, and had left the corvette about five miles astern before the latter got the wreckage of her foremast cleared away and resumed her pursuit at full speed; but Condell had improved the shining hour by putting his own little ship to rights, and getting up more powder and shell in readiness for the renewed attack which he knew must come.
As this thought struck me, I observed the pirate schooner standing away to the nor'ard, almost hull-down on the horizon, and I sat down on the rocks to watch her as she slowly sank from my sight. And I tell you, Ralph, my boy, that I shed more tears that time, at losing you, than I have done, I verify believe, all my life before "
He then descended to his cabin, and in another five minutes had fallen into a state of blissful oblivion. "We can see the flames and smoke from the deck, sir, though the ship herself is still hull-down.
The second craft was still hull-down; but her masts, funnels, tops of her ventilators, and the head of her ensign staff were all visible; and Mildmay noticed that she was showing no colours.
But it was only the van that Fleming had sighted. Many a Spanish straggler was still hull-down astern; and Sidonia had to wait for all to close and form up properly. Meanwhile Drake and Howard were straining every nerve to get out of Plymouth. It was not their fault, but the Queen's-in-Council, that Sidonia had unwittingly stolen this march on them.
Mixing in again for a while with the general watch, he at last goes on the forecastle among the sheet-anchor-men there, at present engaged in critically discussing the merits of the late valiant encounter, and expressing their opinion that by daybreak the enemy in chase would be hull-down out of sight.
Our own dead and wounded were carefully removed to the schooner, and then, the unwounded Frenchmen having been driven below and securely confined in the hold, the skipper put me in charge of the prize, with a crew of twenty men, and the two craft made sail in company, in pursuit of the merchantman, which was now hull-down in the south-western quarter.
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