swivels
on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great
main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and
recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and through each other.

So they roared and flashed, fast clenched to each other in that devil's
wedlock, under a cloud of smoke beneath the cloudless tropic sky; while
all around, the dolphins gambolled, and the flying-fish shot on from
swell to swell, and the rainbow-hued jellies opened and shut their cups
of living crystal to the sun, as merrily as if man had never fallen, and
hell had never broken loose on earth.

So it raged for an hour or more, till all arms were weary, and all
tongues clove to the mouth. And sick men, rotting with scurvy,
scrambled up on deck, and fought with the strength of madness; and tiny
powder-boys, handing up cartridges from the hold, laughed and cheered
as the shots ran past their ears; and old Salvation Yeo, a text upon his
lips, and a fury in his heart as of Joshua or Elijah in old time, worked
on, calm and grim, but with the energy of a boy at play. And now and
then an opening in the smoke showed the Spanish captain, in his suit
of black steel armor, standing cool and proud, guiding and pointing,
careless of the iron hail, but too lofty a gentleman to soil his glove
with aught but a knightly sword-hilt: while Amyas and Will, after the
fashion of the English gentlemen, had stripped themselves nearly as bare
as their own sailors, and were cheering, thrusting, hewing, and hauling,
here, there, and everywhere, like any common mariner, and filling them
with a spirit of self-respect, fellow-feeling, and personal daring,
which the discipline of the Spaniards, more perfect mechanically, but
cold and tyrannous, and crushing spiritually, never could bestow. The
black-plumed senor was obeyed; but the golden-locked Amyas was followed,
and would have been followed through the jaws of hell.

The Spaniards, ere five minutes had passed, poured en masse into the
Rose's waist, but only to their destruction. Between the poop and
forecastle (as was then the fashion) the upper-deck beams were left open
and unplanked, with the exception of a narrow gangway on either side;
and off that fatal ledge the boarders, thrust on by those behind, fell
headlong between the beams to the main-deck below, to be slaughtered
helpless in that pit of destruction, by the double fire from the
bulkheads fore and aft; while the few who