- end_line
- 5626
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.591Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5571
- text
- throat and bowels, as it were, of the Richard—that it cleared
everything before it. The men on the Richard’s covered gun-deck ran
above, like miners from the fire-damp. Collecting on the forecastle,
they continued to fight with grenades and muskets. The soldiers also
were in the lofty tops, whence they kept up incessant volleys,
cascading their fire down as pouring lava from cliffs.
The position of the men in the two ships was now exactly reversed. For
while the Serapis was tearing the Richard all to pieces below deck, and
had swept that covered part almost of the last man, the Richard’s crowd
of musketry had complete control of the upper deck of the Serapis,
where it was almost impossible for man to remain unless as a corpse.
Though in the beginning, the tops of the Serapis had not been
unsupplied with marksmen, yet they had long since been cleared by the
overmastering musketry of the Richard. Several, with leg or arm broken
by a ball, had been seen going dimly downward from their giddy perch,
like falling pigeons shot on the wing.
As busy swallows about barn-eaves and ridge-poles, some of the
Richard’s marksmen, quitting their tops, now went far out on their
yard-arms, where they overhung the Serapis. From thence they dropped
hand-grenades upon her decks, like apples, which growing in one field
fall over the fence into another. Others of their band flung the same
sour fruit into the open ports of the Serapis. A hail-storm of aerial
combustion descended and slanted on the Serapis, while horizontal
thunderbolts rolled crosswise through the subterranean vaults of the
Richard. The belligerents were no longer, in the ordinary sense of
things, an English ship and an American ship. It was a co-partnership
and joint-stock combustion-company of both ships; yet divided, even in
participation. The two vessels were as two houses, through whose
party-wall doors have been cut; one family (the Guelphs) occupying the
whole lower story; another family (the Ghibelines) the whole upper
story.
Meanwhile, determined Paul flew hither and thither like the meteoric
corposant-ball, which shiftingly dances on the tips and verges of
ships’ rigging in storms. Wherever he went, he seemed to cast a pale
light on all faces. Blacked and burnt, his Scotch bonnet was compressed
to a gun-wad on his head. His Parisian coat, with its gold-laced sleeve
laid aside, disclosed to the full the blue tattooing on his arm, which
sometimes in fierce gestures streamed in the haze of the cannonade,
cabalistically terrific as the charmed standard of Satan. Yet his
frenzied manner was less a testimony of his internal commotion than
intended to inspirit and madden his men, some of whom seeing him, in
transports of intrepidity stripped themselves to their trowsers,
exposing their naked bodies to the as naked shot The same was done on
the Serapis, where several guns were seen surrounded by their buff
crews as by fauns and satyrs.
At the beginning of the fray, before the ships interlocked, in the
intervals of smoke which swept over the ships as mist over
mountain-tops, affording open rents here and there—the gun-deck of the
Serapis, at certain points, showed, congealed for the instant in all
attitudes of dauntlessness, a gallery of marble statues—fighting
gladiators.
- title
- Chunk 6