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The fire spread rapidly to the dockyard, caught the unfinished grabs on the stocks, and before long the whole of Angria's shipping was a mass of flame. Meanwhile the bombardment had made little impression on the fortifications, and it appeared to the admiral that time was being wasted. Accordingly he gave orders to elevate the guns and fire over the walls into the interior of the fort.
See, there are torches coming down towards the jetty." The two sprang across the intervening vessel, a dense cloud of smoke following them from the hatchway of Angria's gallivat. Reaching the outermost of the line, Desmond gave the word, the anchor was slipped, the two Biluchis pressed with all their force against the adjacent vessel, and the gallivat moved slowly out.
So long as any great noise and bustle was avoided, the sentinels on the walls of the fort would only suppose, if sounds reached their ears, that the watch on board were securing the gallivats at their moorings. When the sweeps had all been transferred Desmond ordered the prisoners to be brought from Angria's cabin to the smaller vessel.
He would buy none of them at the price of his honor. Diggle was false, unspeakably base; let him do Angria's work if he would; Desmond Burke would never stoop to it. He scarcely argued the matter explicitly with himself: it was settled in Angria's presence by his instinctive repulsion. But it was not in a boy like Desmond, young, strong, high spirited, tamely to fold his hands before adverse fate.
"What do you make of 'em?" he shouted. The mate shut up the telescope and came leisurely down. "I count fifteen in all, sir." "I don't care how many. What are they?" "I calculate they're grabs and gallivats, sir." The captain gave a hoarse chuckle. "By thunder, then, we'll soon turn the tables! Angria's gallivats eh, Mr. Toley? We'll make a haul yet." But Captain Barker was to be disappointed.
Marian told me that her complaints and anger at last drove Rupert to put her ashore, where he gave her, like Sims, into Angria's custody. "And the horrors of that prison," she said, "are not to be described, nor even conceived by one who has not had experience of it.
Among the prisoners, the admiral found Angria's wife, children, and mother, toward whom he demeaned himself with great humanity.*
In ten minutes after the fire began, a shell fell into one of Angria's large ships, and set her on fire. The flames soon spread to the others, fastened together on either side of her, and in less than an hour this fleet, which had for fifty years been the terror of the Malabar coast, was utterly destroyed.
There were six line-of-battle ships, six Company's vessels, five bomb ketches, four Maratha grabs one of them Angria's own grab, the Tremukji, on which Desmond had escaped and forty gallivats. The Tyger led the van. Admiral Watson's flag was hoisted on the Kent, Admiral Pocock's on the Cumberland.
He could only surmise that all manliness and spirit had been crushed out of them, and from motives of prudence he forbore to speak of freedom. But one evening, a sultry August evening when the shed was like an oven, and, bathed in sweat, he felt utterly limp and depressed, he asked the Babu in English whether anyone had ever escaped out of Angria's clutches.
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