spirit-room was broken
open, and buckets of grog were passed along the decks, where many of
the wounded were lying between the guns. These mariners seized the
buckets, and, spite of all remonstrances, gulped down the burning
spirits, till, as Tawney said, the blood suddenly spirted out of their
wounds, and they fell dead to the deck.

The negro had many more stories to tell of this fight; and frequently
he would escort me along our main-deck batteries--still mounting the
same guns used in the battle--pointing out their ineffaceable
indentations and scars. Coated over with the accumulated paint of more
than thirty years, they were almost invisible to a casual eye; but
Tawney knew them all by heart; for he had returned home in the
Neversink, and had beheld these scars shortly after the engagement.

One afternoon, I was walking with him along the gun-deck, when he
paused abreast of the main-mast. "This part of the ship," said he, "we
called the _slaughter-house_ on board the Macedonian. Here the men
fell, five and six at a time. An enemy always directs its shot here, in
order to hurl over the mast, if possible. The beams and carlines
overhead in the Macedonian _slaughter-house_ were spattered with blood
and brains. About the hatchways it looked like a butcher's stall; bits
of human flesh sticking in the ring-bolts. A pig that ran about the
decks escaped unharmed, but his hide was so clotted with blood, from
rooting among the pools of gore, that when the ship struck the sailors
hove the animal overboard, swearing that it would be rank cannibalism
to eat him."

Another quadruped, a goat, lost its fore legs in this fight.

The sailors who were killed--according to the usual custom--were
ordered to be thrown overboard as soon as they fell; no doubt, as the
negro said, that the sight of so many corpses lying around might not
appall the survivors at the guns. Among other instances, he related the
following. A shot entering one of the port-holes, dashed dead two
thirds of a gun's crew. The captain of the next gun, dropping his
lock-string, which he had just pulled, turned over the heap of bodies
to see who they were; when, perceiving an old messmate, who had sailed
with him in many cruises, he burst into tears, and, taking the corpse
up in his arms, and going with it to the side, held it over the water a
moment, and eying it, cried, "Oh God! Tom!"--"D----n your prayers over
that thing! overboard with it, and down to your gun