he
had been a captain of one of the main-deck guns on board Admiral
Codrington's flag-ship, the Asia. Were mine the style of stout old
Chapman's Homer, even then I would scarce venture to give noble Jack's
own version of this fight, wherein, on the 20th of October, A. D. 1827,
thirty-two sail of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians, attacked and
vanquished in the Levant an Ottoman fleet of three ships-of-the line,
twenty-five frigates, and a swarm of fire ships and hornet craft.

"We bayed to be at them," said Jack; "and when we _did_ open fire, we
were like dolphin among the flying-fish. 'Every man take his bird' was
the cry, when we trained our guns. And those guns all smoked like rows
of Dutch pipe-bowls, my hearties! My gun's crew carried small flags in
their bosoms, to nail to the mast in case the ship's colours were shot
away. Stripped to the waistbands, we fought like skinned tigers, and
bowled down the Turkish frigates like nine-pins. Among their
shrouds--swarming thick with small-arm men, like flights of pigeons
lighted on pine-trees--our marines sent their leaden pease and
goose-berries, like a shower of hail-stones in Labrador. It was a
stormy time, my hearties! The blasted Turks pitched into the old Asia's
hull a whole quarry of marble shot, each ball one hundred and fifty
pounds. They knocked three port-holes into one. But we gave them better
than they sent. 'Up and at them, my bull-dog!' said I, patting my gun
on the breech; 'tear open hatchways in their Moslem sides!
White-Jacket, my lad, you ought to have been there. The bay was covered
with masts and yards, as I have seen a raft of snags in the Arkansas
River. Showers of burned rice and olives from the exploding foe fell
upon us like manna in the wilderness. '_Allah! Allah! Mohammed!
Mohammed!_' split the air; some cried it out from the Turkish
port-holes; others shrieked it forth from the drowning waters, their
top-knots floating on their shaven skulls, like black snakes on
half-tide rocks. By those top-knots they believed that their Prophet
would drag them up to Paradise, but they sank fifty fathoms, my
hearties, to the bottom of the bay. 'Ain't the bloody 'Hometons going
to strike yet?' cried my first loader, a Guernsey man, thrusting his
neck out of the port-hole, and looking at the Turkish
line-of-battle-ship near by. That instant his head blew by me like a
bursting Paixhan shot, and the flag of Neb Knowles himself was hauled
down for ever. We dra