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Updated: June 15, 2025
"Her Englishmen have taken her, and turned her guns against us!" Our captain was left standing alone beside the staff where the stars and stripes waved black in the moonlight. "The Alliance is hauling off, sir!" called the midshipman of the mizzen-top. "She is making for the Pallas and the Countess of Scarborough." "Very good, sir," was all the commodore said.
In the mizzen-top of the flagship was stationed a cool old river pilot, who had guided many a huge river steamer, freighted with precious lives, through the mazy channels of the Mississippi. There, high above the battle-smoke, heedless of the grape-shot and bits of flying shell whistling around him, he stood at his post, calmly giving his orders through a speaking-tube that led to the wheel-room.
That idea was somewhat rudely forced upon them when the French flag was run up to the mizzen-top, and a white puff of smoke burst from the vessel, which was followed by a shot, that went hissing over their heads, and plumped right into the middle of the town!
Three groupings of households may be discerned, roughly designated "The North End," "Quaker Hill Proper," and "Wing's Corners." The second of these, being the territory most under scrutiny in Part III, might again be divided into the territory "up by the Meeting House," and that "down by Mizzen-Top."
I flew to the rigging, and my station in the mizzen-top. It was daylight. The crew were swarming up the rigging, and I could distinguish the Lascars forward among the most active. Whatever might have been their intentions for evil, they seemed as eager as any one in taking in the reefs.
Behind Allan, as he now stood looking out from the elevation of the mizzen-top, spread the broad and lonely sea. Before him were the low, black, lurking rocks, and the broken waters of the channel, pouring white and angry into the vast calm of the westward ocean beyond.
"Here it was," said the Captain, pointing out the spot on the quarter- deck below the poop, close to a hatchway, and marked by a copper plate let into the planking, bearing a short inscription commemorating the fact, "that Nelson was standing when that villainous marksman in the Redoutable's mizzen-top hit him, catching sight of the medals on his breast; for, he would stick 'em on, in spite of the advice of Hardy, who was his flag-captain, you know."
She did not fire another great gun during the action. But her tops, like those of her consorts, were filled with riflemen, whose balls swept the decks of the assailing ships. One of these, fired from the mizzen-top of the Redoubtable, not fifteen yards from where Nelson stood, struck him on the left shoulder, piercing the epaulette. It was about quarter after one, in the heat of the action.
Pike was wholly himself again, and I saw him perceptibly pause and decide between the two impulses that tore at him. One was to leap over the bridge-rail and down at the man who shot at him; the other was to retreat. He retreated. And as he bounded aft along the narrow bridge the mutiny began. Arthur Deacon, from the mizzen-top, leaned out and hurled a steel marlin-spike at the fleeing mate.
Allan turned away quickly, convinced that his mind had not yet recovered the shock of the fainting fit. "Don't forget the whisky!" he said, cheerfully, as he sprang into the rigging, and mounted to the mizzen-top. It was past two, the moon was waning, and the darkness that comes before dawn was beginning to gather round the wreck.
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