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Updated: June 19, 2025
According to the orders, we ought to have rather edged off, as soon as the English began to fire, in order to draw them down upon the commodore; but it will be seen that our schooner pursued a very different course. It must have been near midnight, when the enemy began to fire at the Fair American, the sternmost vessel of our weather line.
Over the first officer's prostrate form they sprang at the "falls" of the sternmost the longboat, a huge, bearded seaman in the lead. The captain, with fury in his eye, leaped in the way, shouting blasphemy and orders to go back, and was knocked flat with a single blow.
Moreover, had the four sternmost ships of the enemy's line done their duty as they ought, by slipping their cables soon after the action commenced, and making sail to windward, they would have made an easy capture of the Culloden as she lay aground; and afterwards, by doubling on the Vanguard, they would probably have given a different turn to the affair.
On the part of the Irishman, this feeling is extended to the youthful couple who recline, with clasped hands, along the sternmost seat of the pinnace. As for the Malay, thirst and hunger have also made their marks upon him; but not as with those of Occidental race.
Ay, ay! she's about to set her ensign to the navy men at the yard, and we shall see to whom she belongs." A long, low, expressive whistle from Spike succeeded this remark, the colours of the steamer going up to the end of a gaff on the sternmost of her schooner-rigged masts, just as Mulford ceased speaking.
Captain Olding, addressing the crew, ordered them on no account to fire, lest they might injure a friend instead of a foe. As the Champion stood on, he kept a sharp watch through his telescope on the combatants, neither of which seemed aware of his approach. Presently the sternmost was seen to put down her helm and lay the other aboard on the lee side.
The Brunswick, it should be understood, was leading, then came the Royal Sovereign, next the Bellerophon and Triumph, we being, as I before said, the sternmost. We now saw the Royal Sovereign making signals to the two ships to go ahead, while she, shortening sail, took her station next in line to the Brunswick.
We had just got to the eastward of the south cape as it became dark, and were about four miles from it when it fell calm, and soon after a very light air sprung up from east-north-east, which, with a large westerly swell, scarcely gave the ships steerage way: this situation gave me some anxiety, as I was uncertain whether the sternmost ships had seen Swilly, and they were at this time a little scattered; the breeze, however, favoured us, by freshening up at north-east, which enabled the whole of us to weather those rocks, without the apprehension of passing too near them in the dark: in the morning at day-light they bore west-south-west three leagues.
The sternmost vessel of the enemy, which was the one that had received the concentrated broadsides of two of the English ships, was now on fire somewhere on her lower-deck; three or four of her ports were blown into one big opening, and her decks were a very shambles of dead and wounded.
The admiral, however, hearing the firing, had sent up reinforcements, and Commodore Keppel, calling to the rest of the boats to follow, again dashed forward in the Raleigh's cutter, in a style which so daunted the Chinese that, cutting their cables, they pulled away up the stream. The British seamen cheered and, opening fire from their big guns, were soon up to the sternmost junks.
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