clusion that
our prize must be sacrificed in order to ensure our own safety. He
therefore pulled straight to the _Dolphin_, and ordering the whole of
her boats to be lowered and manned, sent them alongside the frigate,
coming on board himself to superintend the operations upon which he had
decided.

His first act was to order the whole of the frigate's boats to be
stripped of their oars, rowlocks, and bottom-boards, and when this was
done they were lowered, and the prisoners, wounded as well as sound,
sent down into them; when, as soon as he had satisfied himself that the
whole of the Frenchmen were out of the ship, the frigate's boats were
towed about a mile away and cast adrift. Meanwhile, in obedience to
instructions, I had collected all the inflammable material that I could
lay hands upon, and had set the ship on fire in four places, with the
result that when the _Dolphin's_ boats returned alongside our prize to
take us off, she was well alight, with the smoke pouring in dense clouds
up through every opening in the deck. It took us but a short time to
leave her, and the moment that we were once more on board the schooner
the sweeps were manned and the vessel put upon a northerly course, this
direction having been chosen in consequence of the discovery that a
light air had sprung up and was coming down from the northward and
eastward, which would place us dead to windward of our formidable
antagonists by the time that it reached us.

At the moment when the _Dolphin_ began to move, the lugger was some
seven miles away, bearing due west, the brig being about half a mile
astern of her, and the ship perhaps a mile astern of the brig. Very
shortly afterwards the flames burst up through the frigate's main
hatchway, and half an hour later she was blazing from stem to stern; so
that, although we had lost her, there was no chance of her again falling
into the hands of the French.

The breeze was a long time in finding its way down to us; so long,
indeed, that after waiting a full half-hour, with the cat's-paws playing
upon the water within biscuit-toss of us, the helm was ported and the
schooner headed straight for the fringe of delicate blue that marked the
dividing line where the calm and the wind were contending together for
the mastery. This was reached in about a quarter of an hour, when,
after a feeble preliminary rustling, our canvas filled, the sweeps were
laid in, and we began to move through the water at a s