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Updated: May 23, 2025
Presently we could perceive a confusion and noise of struggling on board, and angry voices, as if people were trying to force their way up the hatches from below; and a heavy thumping on the deck, and a creaking of the blocks, and rattling of the cordage, while the mainyard was first braced one way, and then another, as if two parties were striving for the mastery.
James' contention of inferior numbers in the "Frolic" is true in the letter; but the greater rapidity of her firing shows it irrelevant to the issue. The want of the mainyard, which means the lack of the maintopsail, was a more substantial disadvantage. So long as the boom mainsail held, however, it was fairly offset by the fall of the "Wasp's" maintopmast and its consequences.
Although the Estelle had squared her mainyard as a signal of submission, the privateer's men, as they ranged their vessel alongside, thought it advisable to pour in a volley of musketry; this might have proved serious, had it not been that Newton and his crew were all down below, hoping to secure a few changes of linen, which, in a prison, might prove very useful.
Each had eighteen guns, nine to a broadside, but while the sloop had only 92 men and measured only 384 tons, the brig had 135 men and measured 434 tons. The Frolic, on the night of the 17th of October, had been overtaken by a most violent gale of wind, in which she carried away her mainyard, lost her topsails, and sprung her maintopmast.
The Spanish commander, not understanding so strange an order, held on his course. A broadside brought down his mainyard; and a flight of arrows rattled on his deck. He was himself wounded. In a few minutes he was a prisoner, and Our Lady of the Conception and her precious freight were in the corsair's power. The wreck was cut away; the ship was cleared; a prize crew was put on board.
The mainyard, an immense affair nearly a hundred feet long, was formed of many pieces of wood and bamboo bound together with rattans in an ingenious manner. The sail carried by this was of an oblong shape, and was hung out of the centre, so that when the short end was hauled down on deck the long end mounted high in the air, making up for the lowness of the mast itself.
Glenn resolved to make one more appeal to the Spaniards, for he had a bright plan in his head, and he needed no more than the aid of two men to carry it out. A spare mainyard was lashed out on deck, and Joe had noticed it with the seaman's quick eye when he came on board.
The sea is far more restless than upon our coast, the surf habitually higher; and there is such a depth of water in many places around the shore, that, on one occasion, a whale-ship, drawn too near by the current, broke her mainyard against the cliff, without grazing her keel.
"They scuttled her, and then Sharkey and his men, who had been watching us from the brushwood, came off to the ship. His mainyard had been cracked and fished last voyage, so he had suspicions of us, seeing that ours was whole. Then he thought of laying the same trap for you which you had set for him." Craddock groaned. "How came I not to see that fished mainyard?" he muttered.
Aloft, a man was seen to clamber from our mainyard into the very top of the Englishman, where he threw a hand-grenade, as I thought, down her main hatch.
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