three American ironclads
steamed. Indeed, it was a picture of great confusion and distress, and
we hailed those on her bridge three times before we got any answer.
When we did get up on her main-deck, Captain Ross, her commander,
greeted us with great thanks; but he was a sorry spectacle of a man,
being white as his own ensign with anger, and his voice trembled as the
voice of a man suffering some great emotion. He took us to his
chart-room, for he would have all particulars about us, both our names
and addresses, with those of our officers, for a witness when he should
call the British Government to take action.

"Twenty years," he said, with tears of anger in his eyes, "twenty years
I have crossed the Atlantic, but this is the first time that I ever
heard the like. Good God, sirs! it's nothing less than piracy on the
high seas; and they shall swing, every man Jack of them, as high as
Haman! What think ye? They signal me to lie to--me that has the mails
and a hundred thousand pounds in specie aboard; they fire a shot across
my bows, and when I signal that I'll see them in hell before I bate a
knot, why--you watched it yourselves--they struck me in the fo'castle,
and there's two of my dead men below now; but they shall swing"--and he
brought his fist upon the table with a mighty thud--"they shall swing,
if there's only one rope in Europe."

I had sorrow for the man who was thus moved--for the most part, I could
see, at the loss of his two men. Then I went forward with the others to
the place of wreckage, and for the first time in my life I observed the
colossal havoc which a shell may leave in its path. The single shot
which had struck the steamer had cut her two skins of steel as though
they had been skins of cheese: had splintered the wood of the men's
bunks, so that it lay in match-like fragments which a fine knife might
have hewed; had passed again through the steel on the starboard side,
and so burst, leaving the fo'castle one tumbled mass of torn blankets,
little rags of linen, fragments of wood, of steel, of clothes which had
been in the men's chests; and, more horrible to recount, particles of
human flesh. Three men were below when the crash came, and two of them
had their limbs torn apart; while, by one of the miracles which oft
attend the passage of a shot, the third, being in a low bunk when the
shell struck, escaped almost uninjured. This desolate and wrecked cabin
was shown to us by Captain Ross, whose ang