Lyde's anxiety to attack the French was now redoubled, and when they invited him to their breakfast, he was so 'ready to faint with eagerness to encounter them' that he could not stay in the same cabin. He went up 'betwixt decks' to the boy, 'and did earnestly entreat him to go up presently to the cabin and stand behind me, and knock down but one man, in case two laid on me, and I would kill and command all the rest presently.' The boy, however, was timid, and when Lyde, to spur him into resistance, told all the horrible details of his former captivity, he calmly replied: 'If I do find it as hard as you say when I am in France, I will go along with them in a privateer.' 'These words,' writes Lyde, 'struck me to the heart, which made me say: "You dog! What! will you go with them against your King and Country, and Father and Mother? Sirrah! I was a prisoner in France four months, and my tongue cannot express what I endured there, yet I would not turn Papist and go with them. If I should take my brother in a French privateer, after he had sailed willingly with them, I would hang him immediately."' Perhaps at this point the boy began to fear opposing Lyde as much as attacking all the Frenchmen, for he now consented to help, and was told that if he would knock down the man at the helm, all the others should be Lyde's affair. The _sang-froid_ of the ensuing conversation is remarkable. 'Saith the boy, "If you be sure to overcome them, how many do you count to kill?" I answered that I intended to kill three of them. Then the boy replied, "Why three, and no more?" I answered that I would kill three for three of our men that died in Prison when I was there.' Lyde went on to express a hope that some day a 'Man-of-War or Fireship' will try to avenge 'the Death of those four hundred men that died in the same Prison of Dinan.' But the boy's fears found the present scheme too merciful, and he protested, 'Four alive would be too many for us.'
The attack was made when two Frenchmen were asleep in the cabin. 'I went softly aft into the cabin, and put my back against the bulkhead, and took the iron crow and held it with both my hands in the middle of it, and put my legs to shorten myself, because the cabin was very low. But he that being nighest to me, hearing me, opened his eyes, and perceiving my intent and upon what account I was coming, he endeavoured to rise to make resistance against me, but I prevented him by a blow upon his forehead which mortally wounded him.' The other man received a heavy blow as he was rising, 'very fiercely endeavouring to come against me.... The master, lying in his cabin on my right hand, rose and sat in his cabin, and seeing what I had done, he called me by most insulting names.' But 'having his eyes every way,' Lyde turned on him with a blow which made him 'lie as still as if he had been dead.'