At last, when the ship was choved with shot, and peppered with grape, the channel opened; in five minutes more he could put her dead before the wind.
No! The pirate, on whose side luck had been from the first, got half a broadside to bear at long musket-shot, killed a midshipman by Dodd's side, cut away two of the _Agra_'s mizen shrouds, wounded the gaff, and cut the jib-stay. Down fell that powerful sail into the water, and dragged across the ship's forefoot, stopping her way to the open sea she panted for. The mates groaned; the crew cheered stoutly, as British tars do in any great disaster: the pirates yelled with ferocious triumph, like the devils they looked.
But most human events, even calamities, have two sides. The _Agra_ being brought almost to a standstill, the pirate forged ahead against his will, and the combat took a new and terrible form. The elephant gun popped and the rifle cracked in the _Agra's_ mizen top, and the man at the pirate's helm jumped into the air and fell dead: both Theorists claimed him. Then the three carronades peppered him hotly; and he hurled an iron shower back with fatal effect. Then at last the long eighteen-pounders on the gun-deck got a word in. The old Niler was not the man to miss a vessel alongside in a quiet sea: he sent two round shot clean through him; the third splintered his bulwark and swept across his deck.
“His masts--fire at his masts!” roared Dodd to Monk, through his trumpet. He then got the jib clear, and made what sail he could without taking all the hands from the guns.
This kept the vessels nearly alongside a few minutes, and the fight was hot as fire. The pirate now for the first time hoisted his flag. It was black as ink. His crew yelled as it rose: the Britons, instead of quailing, cheered with fierce derision; the pirate's wild crew of yellow Malays, black chinless Papuans, and bronzed Portuguese, served their side guns, twelve-pounders, well, and with ferocious cries. The white Britons, drunk with battle now, naked to the waist, grimed with powder, and spotted like leopards with blood, their and their mates', replied with loud undaunted cheers and a deadly hail of grape from the quarter-deck; while the master-gunner and his mates, loading with a rapidity the mixed races opposed could not rival, hulled the schooner well between wind and water, and then fired chain-shot at her masts, as ordered, and began to play the mischief with her shrouds and rigging. Meantime, Fullalove and Kenealy, aided by Vespasian, who loaded, were quietly butchering the pirate crew two a minute, and hoped to settle the question they were fighting for: smooth bore _v._ rifle; but unluckily neither fired once without killing; so “there was nothing proven.”