losion
suddenly shook the air. One of the largest galleons, engaged in combat
with a couple of Dutch vessels, had received a hot shot full in her
powder magazine, and blew up with all on board. The blazing fragments
drifted about among the other ships, and two more were soon on fire,
their guns going off and their magazines exploding. The rock of Gibraltar
seemed to reel. To the murky darkness succeeded the intolerable glare of
a new and vast conflagration. The scene in that narrow roadstead was now
almost infernal. It seemed, said an eye-witness, as if heaven and earth
were passing away. A hopeless panic seized the Spaniards. The battle was
over. The St. Augustine still lay in the deadly embrace of her
antagonists, but all the other galleons were sunk or burned. Several of
the lesser war-ships had also been destroyed. It was nearly sunset. The
St. Augustine at last ran up a white flag, but it was not observed in the
fierceness of the last moments of combat; the men from the bolus and the
Tiger making a simultaneous rush on board the vanquished foe.

The fight was done, but the massacre was at its beginning. The trumpeter,
of Captain Kleinsorg clambered like a monkey up the mast of the St.
Augustine, hauled down the admiral's flag, the last which was still
waving, and gained the hundred florins. The ship was full of dead and
dying; but a brutal, infamous butchery now took place. Some Netherland
prisoners were found in the hold, who related that two messengers had
been successively despatched to take their lives, as they lay there in
chains, and that each had been shot, as he made his way towards the
execution of the orders.

This information did not chill the ardour of their victorious countrymen.
No quarter was given. Such of the victims as succeeded in throwing
themselves overboard, out of the St. Augustine, or any of the burning or
sinking ships, were pursued by the Netherlanders, who rowed about among
them in boats, shooting, stabbing, and drowning their victims by
hundreds. It was a sickening spectacle. The bay, said those who were
there, seemed sown with corpses. Probably two or three thousand were thus
put to death, or had met their fate before. Had the chivalrous Heemskerk
lived, it is possible that he might have stopped the massacre. But the
thought of the grief which would fill the commonwealth when the news
should arrive of his death--thus turning the joy of the great triumph
into lamentations--increased the