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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Thompson," said I, "let us see if we cannot beat them from their guns. Let's port the helm and close her, till we can shy a biscuit on board." "Just my opinion, Simple; we'll see if they won't make another sort of running fight of it." In a few minutes we were so close on board of her, that the men who loaded the guns could touch each other with their rammers and sponges.
His heart was swelling with such variety of feeling that he could not at first trust himself to speak. When they had descended the ladder, and were picking their way, stepping over the rammers, sponges, and tackles, stretched across the main-deck, Newton observed "This is not the first time I have been commissioned to place you in security.
A mighty muffled blast sent the Bon homme Richard rolling to larboard, and the smoke eddied from our hatches and lifted out of the space between the ships. The Englishman had blown off his gun-ports. And next some one shouted that our battery of twelves was fighting them muzzle to muzzle below, our rammers leaning into the Serapis to send their shot home.
The guns were loaded, but rammers, matches, wadding, cannon-balls, were all out of place, and not immediately accessible. The crew were merchant sailors and landsmen, all undrilled in the duties peculiar to an armed ship. There had been lying for some time at the same anchorage the British frigate Leopard, fifty guns; and this ship also put to sea at noon of the same day.
Seven gentlemen hurriedly gathered together, one a doctor and another in full possession of a mahogany case containing two duelling pistols with their accompanying ammunition, G. D. gun caps, powder-horn, swabs and rammers, and it past eleven o'clock at night, would have excited but little interest to the average darky especially one unaccustomed to the portents and outcomes of such proceedings.
The space between the decks was filled with smoke, through which the twinkling light of the lanterns could scarcely penetrate, the flashes at each, discharge showing the men, begrimed with powder, with sponge and rammers ready to load, or with their tackles to run in their guns.
They were so close, indeed, that the English gunners could not raise the lower port lids, and they blew them off by firing their cannon through them. The men on each ship in loading were forced to push their rammers into the ports of the other vessel. The Bonhomme Richard was set on fire by burning wads, but the flames were speedily extinguished.
For a few minutes the two ships plunged ahead so near each other that the rammers of the American sailors struck the side of the Frolic as they drove the shot down the throats of their guns. It was literally muzzle to muzzle. Then they crashed together and the Wasp's jib-boom was thrust between the Frolic's masts.
Models of cannon, bronze castings, sights covered with dents, plates battered by the shots of the Gun Club, assortments of rammers and sponges, chaplets of shells, wreaths of projectiles, garlands of howitzers in short, all the apparatus of the artillerist, enchanted the eye by this wonderful arrangement and induced a kind of belief that their real purpose was ornamental rather than deadly.
He saw them lying there in the fading daylight, with the sponges and the rammers still in their hands, and he saw upon each man's face the look with which he had met and recognized the end. Some were smiling, some staring, and one lay grinning as if at a ghastly joke.
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