sly slave the other day, whom you sent
to betray us, though you, yourself, were too great a coward to come
amongst us, yes, to come amongst us yourself. Aha! colonel."

He said this in plain English, which language he spoke as fluently as he
did French, the native language of Hayti, uttering his abusive threats
loud enough for us to hear every syllable; but though I aimed at him
while he was speaking twice point blank, and my revolver spoke out quite
as loudly as he, while the colonel likewise shot at him and the skipper
made a slash in his direction with his cutlass, the miscreant escaped
all our attacks without a single wound, dodging away from us amongst his
dusky compatriots, who were now pretty thickly mixed up with our men in
a fierce _melee_, at the further end of the poop, overlooking the waist
below.

In the midst of this awful scrimmage there came a wild rush aft of all
the remaining blacks who had been engaged with some of the hands
amidships, pursued by our second boarding party, led by Mr Fosset and
Stoddart, who had made their way over the bows and cleared the
fo'c's'le, fighting onward step by step along the upper deck; and hemmed
in fast thus, between two fires, the black desperadoes made a last
stand, refusing to surrender, or throw down their arms in spite of all
promises of quarter on our part.

All of them could see for themselves how completely overmatched they
were, and must have known the utter uselessness of attempting any
further resistance to us; but the mutineers of the negro portion of the
_Saint Pierre's_ crew, who were now in the majority, feared to give in
owing to the fact of their believing they would be ultimately hanged if
taken alive after the atrocities they had committed; so being of the
opinion they were bound to be killed in any case, they determined
apparently, if die they must, they would die fighting.

Whatever might be their motive or conviction, I will give them the
credit of being plucky, and must say that they fought bravely, though
with a ferocity that was more than savage, to the bitter end, their last
rally on the break of the poop being the fiercest episode of the fray,
several hand-to-hand combats going on at one and the same time with hand
pikes and capstan bars whirling about over the heads of those engaged,
where cutlass cuts were met with knife-thrusts from the formidable long-
bladed weapons the negroes carried in their hands only to sheathe them
in the bodi