As he never fought before."
Then up spoke one of the gunner's mates,
A grim old man was he,
Who'd met the French and the Algerines
In many a fight at sea,
Whose cheek was rough with a hundred storms,
And brown with a hundred suns:
"If the quarter-deck will mind the flag,
Why, we will mind the guns."

Oh, sweet to see was the English ship,
As up in the wind she came,
With her rigging silhouetted out
Against the skies aflame.
Sudden she yawed, and from her bows
A puff of smoke there blew,
And, hurrying over their lofty arch,
The plunging missiles flew,
And each of us gripped his cutlass tight,
And each his muscles set,
And each looked hard at the long bow-guns,
But the Captain said, "Not yet."

Closer and closer drew the foe,
Her shot flew thick and fast,
And, singing around our heads, a storm
Of musket-bullets passed.
We drew well up on her weather-beam,
And the roar of her guns rose higher,
And we saw her gunner's matches gleam,
And the Captain shouted, "Fire!"
With flash on flash, with a thunder crash,
Rang out our red broadside,
And the splinters broke from her sides of oak,
And scattered far and wide.
The smoke rose up to the high dim trucks,
As the battle fury spread,
But the men stood true, and the flags still flew,
In the mist at each masthead.
Deadly and fierce was the fire we poured
Upon our sturdy foe,
And a cheer we roared as by the board
We saw her mizzen go.
Then around in the dying breeze she swung,
And her bowsprit loomed o'erhead,
And fouled in our mizzen shrouds she hung.
And the battle lightning spread;
We heard the splinters fly below,
Where her 32-pounders played,
And the cabin was filled with smoke and flame
From her furious cannonade.
Then, long dirk ready and cutlass keen,
Up, up to her side we start,
But a breeze blows over the darkening sea
And swings the ships apart;
But readily 'round in the wind we go,
And steadily on we fall.
With grape and shrapnel and solid shot,
And pattering musket-ball.
And over her bows in the dusk we draw,
While our terrible broadsides peal,
And her lingering rolls the gaping holes
In her shattered hull reveal.
Her sides we rend, our shot we send
Through shroud and spar and stay.
Till her main and fore with a crashing roar
Plunge down to the spouting