ainst the vice-admiral, striking her somewhere forward, as our hero
could see by a great shower of splinters that flew up in the moonlight.

At the sound of the shot all the vessels of the flota not yet disturbed
by the alarm were aroused at once, so that the pirates had the
satisfaction of knowing that they would have to run the gantlet of all
the ships between them and the open sea before they could reckon
themselves escaped.

And, indeed, to our hero's mind it seemed that the battle which
followed must have been the most terrific cannonade that was ever heard
in the world. It was not so ill at first, for it was some while before
the Spaniards could get their guns clear for action, they being not the
least in the world prepared for such an occasion as this. But by-and-by
first one and then another ship opened fire upon the galleon, until it
seemed to our hero that all the thunders of heaven let loose upon them
could not have created a more prodigious uproar, and that it was not
possible that they could any of them escape destruction.

By now the moon had risen full and round, so that the clouds of smoke
that rose in the air appeared as white as snow. The air seemed full of
the hiss and screaming of shot, each one of which, when it struck the
galleon, was magnified by our hero's imagination into ten times its
magnitude from the crash which it delivered and from the cloud of
splinters it would cast up into the moonlight. At last he suddenly
beheld one poor man knocked sprawling across the deck, who, as he
raised his arm from behind the mast, disclosed that the hand was gone
from it, and that the shirt-sleeve was red with blood in the moonlight.
At this sight all the strength fell away from poor Harry, and he felt
sure that a like fate or even a worse must be in store for him.

But, after all, this was nothing to what it might have been in broad
daylight, for what with the darkness of night, and the little
preparation the Spaniards could make for such a business, and the
extreme haste with which they discharged their guns (many not
understanding what was the occasion of all this uproar), nearly all the
shot flew so wide of the mark that not above one in twenty struck that
at which it was aimed.

Meantime Captain Morgan, with the Sieur Simon, who had followed him
upon deck, stood just above where our hero lay behind the shelter of
the bulwark. The captain had lit a pipe of tobacco, and he stood now in
the bright moon