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Updated: June 10, 2025
This task completed, and the whole of the captured pirates transferred to the hold of the big felucca round the open hatchway of which four of her brass nine-pounders were ranged, loaded with langridge, within view of our prisoners, and their muzzles depressed so that they pointed right down into the interior of the hold our next business was to land a party for the purpose of securing whatever booty could be found, and afterwards to destroy the various buildings and stores of the depot.
The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot.
After the Serapis and the Richard had been well lashed together, there began a new phase of the battle, which had already lasted about an hour. There were only three guns left in action on the Richard, nine-pounders on the quarter-deck, and the ship was badly leaking. The eighteen-pounders of the enemy had riddled the gun-deck of the American ship, rendering her, below-decks, entirely untenable.
During the war between France and America, a merchantman, armed with nine-pounders, actually beat off a sloop-of-war and several Spanish privateers; but now frigates, and even sloops-of-war, are armed with Dahlgren guns of eight- to eleven-inch bore, which throw balls of sixty to one hundred pounds, also with superior rifled cannon.
The Lieutenant had now prize money enough to be converted, on his return, into a large bundle of continental bills, which he stowed away in a chaise box, on taking a journey, but which he could not find when he arrived at his destination. He kept his own secret, however, and "went to sea again," second in command of the United States' ship Saratoga, of sixteen nine-pounders.
"Ah, shure!" said the plucky Irish lady, "the shells were dhroppin' all round here; but they were only nine-pounders, and we don't take any notice of them at all." No words can describe the cheerful, patient behaviour of those devoted Sisters through the siege.
I next proceeded leisurely forward, noting on my way the fact that the schooner mounted a battery of four brass nine-pounders on her starboard side and of course her port battery would be the same. The main hatchway was securely covered in with a grating, up through which arose the unmistakable odour which betrays the presence of slaves in a ship's hold.
"Wait just a moment yet," said the skipper, raising a warning hand to Brook and squinting along his gun at the same time. "Now, fire!" The report of the two brass nine-pounders rang sharply out at the same moment, making the schooner quiver to her keel, and severely testing the construction of her cradle.
This moderation rendered our passage all the more agreeable. The Tigris was a very fast ship, besides being well-found. She was a little larger than the John, and mounted twelve guns, nine-pounders. In consequence of the additions made to her crew, one way and another, she now mustered nearer fifty than forty souls on board.
In a ninety days' cruise she captured, sunk, or otherwise destroyed British property to the amount of a million and a half dollars, and took two hundred and seventeen prisoners. All this was not done without some hard fighting. One prize His Britannic Majesty's packet-ship "Princess Amelia" was armed with nine-pounders, and made a gallant defence before surrendering.
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