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Updated: May 27, 2025
We were consequently sailing at right angles to the stranger, and rather drawing away from the line of her course than otherwise; yet such was the speed with which she came along that in half an hour she was hull-up from our deck.
Just about sunset the Shikishima, with her attendant cruisers, hove in sight, and before they were hull-up it was possible for us to distinguish that the Yashima was not among them. She had gone down off Dalny in shallow water, fortunately but not until every man had been safely taken out of her.
And there, at last, they perceived the fleet, hull-up above the horizon, in plain sight, with every sail set, carrying on after the pirate at their utmost speed.
It is true that we in the Mercury did but little toward the abbreviation of the distance between the two vessels, for the reason already mentioned, yet when the tenth day of the calm dawned the schooner was hull-up in the southern board, some six miles distant from us.
The sun set in a perfectly clear and cloudless sky, just as we had brought the ship hull-up; but by that time she was a mass of flame fore and aft, and I began to fear that we should be too late to save her crew or to do any good whatever on board her. We kept steadily on, however, and reached her half an hour later.
At length, when we had brought the chase fairly hull-up it became apparent that, thanks to the pains taken by the skipper to improve our rate of sailing, the Eros was now a trifle the faster vessel of the two; and that, consequently, nothing short of an accident could prevent us from getting alongside the chase.
At length, after I had been aboard about half-an-hour, I was ready to return to our own ship; I therefore ordered two hands down into the boat alongside, and shoved off for the Europa, noting, with great satisfaction as I did so, that the breeze was fast dropping, and that the two Indiamen were still hull-up, not having made very much progress to windward during the time that I had been aboard the prize.
Nor were we alone. Frequently two or three American clippers would be hull-up at the same moment within our horizon, bound the same way; and it was singular how, despite the apparently unbroken calm, we got away from one another and disappeared. Ships lying with their heads "all around the compass" flapped themselves along in the direction of their bows, the line of least resistance.
Then Milsom rang down to the engine-room for half speed; and a little later, when the Maranon was hull-up and the two vessels were closing fast, he ordered the forward port twelve-pound quick-firer to be loaded with a blank charge.
They had kept her hull-up until sunset, firing several shots after her, but the next morning she was nowhere to be seen.
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