having by this time cleared away one of its guns, was able to
fire a parting shot against 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