5. Soon after, Captain Jones sailed in the Ranger for the Scottish coast, on his first cruise in British waters. On the seventh day he was between the Isle of Man and Whitehaven waters, which he knew as familiarly as New-Yorkers do the Narrows. Whitehaven was the town at which he had been apprenticed, and from which he had sailed for ten years. It was a town of several thousand inhabitants, and its harbor contained three or four hundred vessels closely moored together. Jones had formed the daring scheme of running in near the port, landing two parties, burning all these ships, and retiring before an armed force could be raised to repel him.
6. At midnight, with two boats and thirty-one men, provided with combustibles and dark-lanterns, he left his ship and made for Whitehaven pier. Day was dawning when he reached it, for the light wind had made him hours too late in starting. He would not abandon the enterprise, however, unpromising as it seemed. Sending one boat to the north side of the harbor to fire the vessels collected there, he went himself to do the same office to the stranded fleet on the south side.
7. Familiar with every foot of the ground he had to traverse, he boldly landed under the guns of the two forts that protected the harbor, and he himself climbed the wall of one of them, and spiked every gun, without giving alarm. All the sentinels, he found, had gone to the guard-house, and there he secured and disarmed every one of them without giving or receiving a scratch. Then, accompanied by one man, he scaled the other fort and spiked its guns. Returning to the pier to begin the conflagration, he found there the other boat, which had come back for a light, the candles in the lanterns having burned out. Jones now discovered that all his own candles were consumed, and there was not in either boat a spark of fire, or the means of kindling one. The day, too, had dawned, and every second was precious. Nevertheless, he sent one of his men to a house near by for a light, who soon returned successful, and the boats again separated for the work of destruction.
8. Ten minutes later a barrel of fat, ignited in the steerage of a ship that lay surrounded by a hundred and fifty others, all left high and dry by the receded tide, shot a bolt of roaring flame through the hatchway. The people of the town, in hundreds, were soon running to the pier. Captain Jones stood by the side of the burning vessel, pistol in hand, and ordered the crowd to keep their distance, which they did. Not till the flames had caught the rigging and wreathed about the mainmast, not till the sun was an hour high, not till the whole town was rushing amazed to the scene, did Jones give the order to embark.