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"Topmen, aloft! loose top-gallant sails and royals clear away the flying-jib," were orders that were hardly out of the mouth of the first-lieutenant, breathless with his rapid descent from aloft, when the gaskets were off; and the sails hung fluttering from the yards.
Suddenly with a violent jerk up she rose again on an even keel with her topmasts carried away, and the rigging beating with fearful force about our heads. "Clear away the wreck!" shouted the Captain. Such was now the no easy task to be performed. The officers, however, with axes in their hands, leading the way, sprang aloft, followed by the topmen.
With which response to Commander Nesbitt's order, I sprang down the after-hatchway on to the main deck, proceeding thence below to where old "Joe" and his topmen were working. Of course I gave the lieutenant the mandate with which I had been charged; but I remaining, boylike, to watch what was going on, the commander not having told me to return immediately, though I ought to have done so.
"You'll do, lads," he said. "You'll make prime topmen in a few weeks, and thank me for having taught you." Such was the commencement of our sea life. Things, we agreed, might have been worse, though we got many a kick and rope's ending, not only from the boatswain, but from others among the more brutal of the crew.
All the ducks and geese were dead, the eggs and crockery all broke, the grocery almost all washed away; in short, as O'Brien observed, there was "a very pretty general average." Mr Falcon was still very angry. "Who are the men missing?" inquired he, of Swinburne, the coxswain, as he came up the side. "Williams and Sweetman, sir." "Two of the smartest topmen, I am told.
But still the Centurion kept her first advantageous position, firing her cannon with great regularity and briskness, whilst at the same time the galleon's decks lay open to her topmen, who having at their first volley driven the Spaniards from their tops, made prodigious havoc with their small arms, killing or wounding every officer but one that ever appeared on the quarter-deck, and wounding in particular the General of the galleon himself; and though the Centurion, after the first half-hour, lost her original situation and was close alongside the galleon, and the enemy continued to fire briskly for near an hour longer, yet at last the Commodore's grape-shot swept their decks so effectually, and the number of their slain and wounded was so considerable, that they began to fall into great disorder, especially as the General, who was the life of the action, was no longer capable of exerting himself.
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