THEY FIGHT THE SERAPIS.
The battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis stands in
history as the first signal collision on the sea between the Englishman
and the American. For obstinacy, mutual hatred, and courage, it is
without precedent or subsequent in the story of ocean. The strife long
hung undetermined, but the English flag struck in the end.
There would seem to be something singularly indicatory in this
engagement. It may involve at once a type, a parallel, and a prophecy.
Sharing the same blood with England, and yet her proved foe in two
wars—not wholly inclined at bottom to forget an old grudge—intrepid,
unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized
in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul
Jones of nations.
Regarded in this indicatory light, the battle between the Bon Homme
Richard and the Serapis—in itself so curious—may well enlist our
interest.
Never was there a fight so snarled. The intricacy of those incidents
which defy the narrator’s extrication, is not illy figured in that
bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchors of the two
ships, which confounded them for the time in one chaos of devastation.
Elsewhere than here the reader must go who seeks an elaborate version
of the fight, or, indeed, much of any regular account of it whatever.
The writer is but brought to mention the battle because he must needs
follow, in all events, the fortunes of the humble adventurer whose life
lie records. Yet this necessarily involves some general view of each
conspicuous incident in which he shares.
Several circumstances of the place and time served to invest the fight
with a certain scenic atmosphere casting a light almost poetic over the
wild gloom of its tragic results. The battle was fought between the
hours of seven and ten at night; the height of it was under a full
harvest moon, in view of thousands of distant spectators crowning the
high cliffs of Yorkshire.
From the Tees to the Humber, the eastern coast of Britain, for the most
part, wears a savage, melancholy, and Calabrian aspect. It is in course
of incessant decay. Every year the isle which repulses nearly all other
foes, succumbs to the Attila assaults of the deep. Here and there the
base of the cliffs is strewn with masses of rock, undermined by the
waves, and tumbled headlong below, where, sometimes, the water
completely surrounds them, showing in shattered confusion detached
rocks, pyramids, and obelisks, rising half-revealed from the surf—the
Tadmores of the wasteful desert of the sea. Nowhere is this desolation
more marked than for those fifty miles of coast between Flamborough
Head and the Spurm.
Weathering out the gale which had driven them from Leith, Paul’s ships
for a few days were employed in giving chase to various merchantmen and
colliers; capturing some, sinking others, and putting the rest to
flight. Off the mouth of the Humber they ineffectually manoeuvred with
a view of drawing out a king’s frigate, reported to be lying at anchor
within. At another time a large fleet was encountered, under convoy of
some ships of force. But their panic caused the fleet to hug the edge
of perilous shoals very nigh the land, where, by reason of his having
no competent pilot, Paul durst not approach to molest them. The same
night he saw two strangers further out at sea, and chased them until
three in the morning, when, getting pretty nigh, he surmised that they
must needs be vessels of his own squadron, which, previous to his
entering the Firth of Forth, had separated from his command. Daylight
proved this supposition correct. Five vessels of the original squadron
were now once more in company. About noon a fleet of forty merchantmen
appeared coming round Flamborough Head, protected by two English
man-of-war, the Serapis and Countess of Scarborough. Descrying the five
cruisers sailing down, the forty sail, like forty chickens, fluttered
in a panic under the wing of the shore. Their armed protectors bravely
steered from the land, making the disposition for battle. Promptly
accepting the challenge, Paul, giving the signal to his consorts,
earnestly pressed forward. But, earnest as he was, it was seven in the
evening ere the encounter began. Meantime his comrades, heedless of his
signals, sailed independently along. Dismissing them from present
consideration, we confine ourselves, for a while, to the Richard and
the Serapis, the grand duellists of the fight.
The Richard carried a motley, crew, to keep whom in order one hundred
and thirty-five soldiers—themselves a hybrid band—had been put on
board, commanded by French officers of inferior rank. Her armament was
similarly heterogeneous; guns of all sorts and calibres; but about
equal on the whole to those of a thirty-two-gun frigate. The spirit of
baneful intermixture pervaded this craft throughout.
The Serapis was a frigate of fifty guns, more than half of which
individually exceeded in calibre any one gun of the Richard. She had a
crew of some three hundred and twenty trained man-of-war’s men.
There is something in a naval engagement which radically distinguishes
it from one on the land. The ocean, at times, has what is called its
_sea_ and its _trough of the sea_; but it has neither rivers, woods,
banks, towns, nor mountains. In mild weather it is one hammered plain.
Stratagems, like those of disciplined armies—ambuscades, like those of
Indians, are impossible. All is clear, open, fluent. The very element
which sustains the combatants, yields at the stroke of a feather. One
wind and one tide at one time operate upon all who here engage. This
simplicity renders a battle between two men-of-war, with their huge
white wings, more akin to the Miltonic contests of archangels than to
_the comparatively squalid_ tussles of earth.
As the ships neared, a hazy darkness overspread the water. The moon was
not yet risen. Objects were perceived with difficulty. Borne by a soft
moist breeze over gentle waves, they came within pistol- shot. Owing to
the obscurity, and the known neighborhood of other vessels, the Serapis
was uncertain who the Richard was. Through the dim mist each ship
loomed forth to the other vast, but indistinct, as the ghost of Morven.
Sounds of the trampling of resolute men echoed from either hull, whose
tight decks dully resounded like drum-heads in a funeral march.
The Serapis hailed. She was answered by a broadside. For half an hour
the combatants deliberately manoeuvred, continually changing their
position, but always within shot fire. The. Serapis—the better sailer
of the two—kept critically circling the Richard, making lounging
advances now and then, and as suddenly steering off; hate causing her
to act not unlike a wheeling cock about a hen, when stirred by the
contrary passion. Meantime, though within easy speaking distance, no
further syllable was exchanged; but an incessant cannonade was kept up.
At this point, a third party, the Scarborough, drew near, seemingly
desirous of giving assistance to her consort. But thick smoke was now
added to the night’s natural obscurity. The Scarborough imperfectly
discerned two ships, and plainly saw the common fire they made; but
which was which, she could not tell. Eager to befriend the Serapis, she
durst not fire a gun, lest she might unwittingly act the part of a foe.
As when a hawk and a crow are clawing and beaking high in the air, a
second crow flying near, will seek to join the battle, but finding no
fair chance to engage, at last flies away to the woods; just so did the
Scarborough now. Prudence dictated the step; because several chance
shot—from which of the combatants could not be known—had already struck
the Scarborough. So, unwilling uselessly to expose herself, off went
for the present this baffled and ineffectual friend.
Not long after, an invisible hand came and set down a great yellow lamp
in the east. The hand reached up unseen from below the horizon, and set
the lamp down right on the rim of the horizon, as on a threshold; as
much as to say, Gentlemen warriors, permit me a little to light up this
rather gloomy looking subject. The lamp was the round harvest moon; the
one solitary foot-light of the scene. But scarcely did the rays from
the lamp pierce that languid haze. Objects before perceived with
difficulty, now glimmered ambiguously. Bedded in strange vapors, the
great foot-light cast a dubious, half demoniac glare across the waters,
like the phantasmagoric stream sent athwart a London flagging in a
night-rain from an apothecary’s blue and green window. Through this
sardonical mist, the face of the Man-in-the-Moon—looking right towards
the combatants, as if he were standing in a trap-door of the sea,
leaning forward leisurely with his arms complacently folded over upon
the edge of the horizon—this queer face wore a serious, apishly
self-satisfied leer, as if the Man-in-the-Moon had somehow secretly put
up the ships to their contest, and in the depths of his malignant old
soul was not unpleased to see how well his charms worked. There stood
the grinning Man-in-the-Moon, his head just dodging into view over the
rim of the sea:—Mephistopheles prompter of the stage.
Aided now a little by the planet, one of the consorts of the Richard,
the Pallas, hovering far outside the fight, dimly discerned the
suspicious form of a lonely vessel unknown to her. She resolved to
engage it, if it proved a foe. But ere they joined, the unknown
ship—which proved to be the Scarborough—received a broadside at long
gun’s distance from another consort of the Richard the Alliance. The
shot whizzed across the broad interval like shuttlecocks across a great
hall. Presently the battledores of both batteries were at work, and
rapid compliments of shuttlecocks were very promptly exchanged. The
adverse consorts of the two main belligerents fought with all the rage
of those fiery seconds who in some desperate duels make their
principal’s quarrel their own. Diverted from the Richard and the
Serapis by this little by-play, the Man-in-the-Moon, all eager to see
what it was, somewhat raised himself from his trap-door with an added
grin on his face. By this time, off sneaked the Alliance, and down
swept the Pallas, at close quarters engaging the Scarborough; an
encounter destined in less than an hour to end in the latter ship’s
striking her flag.
Compared to the Serapis and the Richard, the Pallas and the Scarborough
were as two pages to two knights. In their immature way they showed the
same traits as their fully developed superiors.
The Man-in-the-Moon now raised himself still higher to obtain a better
view of affairs.
But the Man-in-the-Moon was not the only spectator. From the high
cliffs of the shore, and especially from the great promontory of
Flamborough Head, the scene was witnessed by crowds of the islanders.
Any rustic might be pardoned his curiosity in view of the spectacle,
presented. Far in the indistinct distance fleets of frightened
merchantmen filled the lower air with their sails, as flakes of snow in
a snow-storm by night. Hovering undeterminedly, in another direction,
were several of the scattered consorts of Paul, taking no part in the
fray. Nearer, was an isolated mist, investing the Pallas and
Scarborough—a mist slowly adrift on the sea, like a floating isle, and
at intervals irradiated with sparkles of fire and resonant with the
boom of cannon. Further away, in the deeper water, was a lurid cloud,
incessantly torn in shreds of lightning, then fusing together again,
once more to be rent. As yet this lurid cloud was neither stationary
nor slowly adrift, like the first-mentioned one; but, instinct with
chaotic vitality, shifted hither and thither, foaming with fire, like a
valiant water-spout careering off the coast of Malabar.
To get some idea of the events enacting in that cloud, it will be
necessary to enter it; to go and possess it, as a ghost may rush into a
body, or the devils into the swine, which running down the steep place
perished in the sea; just as the Richard is yet to do.
Thus far the Serapis and the Richard had been manoeuvring and chasing
to each other like partners in a cotillion, all the time indulging in
rapid repartee.
But finding at last that the superior managableness of the enemy’s ship
enabled him to get the better of the clumsy old Indiaman, the Richard,
in taking position, Paul, with his wonted resolution, at once sought to
neutralize this, by hugging him close. But the attempt to lay the
Richard right across the head of the Serapis ended quite otherwise, in
sending the enemy’s jib-boom just over the Richard’s great tower of
Pisa, where Israel was stationed; who, catching it eagerly, stood for
an instant holding to the slack of the sail, like one grasping a horse
by the mane prior to vaulting into the saddle.
“Aye, hold hard, lad,” cried Paul, springing to his side with a coil of
rigging. With a few rapid turns he knitted himself to his foe. The wind
now acting on the sails of the Serapis forced her, heel and point, her
entire length, cheek by jowl, alongside the Richard. The projecting
cannon scraped; the yards interlocked; but the hulls did not touch. A
long lane of darkling water lay wedged between, like that narrow canal
in Venice which dozes between two shadowy piles, and high in air is
secretly crossed by the Bridge of Sighs. But where the six yard-arms
reciprocally arched overhead, three bridges of sighs were both seen and
heard, as the moon and wind kept rising.
Into that Lethean canal—pond-like in its smoothness as compared with
the sea without—fell many a poor soul that night; fell, forever
forgotten.
As some heaving rent coinciding with a disputed frontier on a volcanic
plain, that boundary abyss was the jaws of death to both sides. So
contracted was it, that in many cases the gun-rammers had to be thrust
into the opposite ports, in order to enter to muzzles of their own
cannon. It seemed more an intestine feud, than a fight between
strangers. Or, rather, it was as if the Siamese Twins, oblivious of
their fraternal bond, should rage in unnatural fight.
Ere long, a horrible explosion was heard, drowning for the instant the
cannonade. Two of the old eighteen-pounders—before spoken of, as having
been hurriedly set up below the main deck of the Richard—burst all to
pieces, killing the sailors who worked them, and shattering all that
part of the hull, as if two exploded steam-boilers had shot out of its
opposite sides. The effect was like the fall of the walls of a house.
Little now upheld the great tower of Pisa but a few naked crow
stanchions. Thenceforth, not a few balls from the Serapis must have
passed straight through the Richard without grazing her. It was like
firing buck-shot through the ribs of a skeleton.
But, further forward, so deadly was the broadside from the heavy
batteries of the Serapis—levelled point-blank, and right down the
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.
Stooping low and intent, with one braced leg thrust behind, and one arm
thrust forward, curling round towards the muzzle of the gun, there was
seen the _loader_, performing his allotted part; on the other side of
the carriage, in the same stooping posture, but with both hands holding
his long black pole, pike-wise, ready for instant use—stood the eager
_rammer and sponger_; while at the breech, crouched the wary _captain
of the gun_, his keen eye, like the watching leopard’s, burning along
the range; and behind all, tall and erect, the Egyptian symbol of
death, stood the _matchman_, immovable for the moment, his long-handled
match reversed. Up to their two long death-dealing batteries, the
trained men of the Serapis stood and toiled in mechanical magic of
discipline. They tended those rows of guns, as Lowell girls the rows of
looms in a cotton factory. The Parcae were not more methodical; Atropos
not more fatal; the automaton chess-player not more irresponsible.
“Look, lad; I want a grenade, now, thrown down their main hatchway. I
saw long piles of cartridges there. The powder monkeys have brought
them up faster than they can be used. Take a bucket of combustibles,
and let’s hear from you presently.”
These words were spoken by Paul to Israel. Israel did as ordered. In a
few minutes, bucket in hand, begrimed with powder, sixty feet in air,
he hung like Apollyon from the extreme tip of the yard over the fated
abyss of the hatchway. As he looked down between the eddies of smoke
into that slaughterous pit, it was like looking from the verge of a
cataract down into the yeasty pool at its base. Watching, his chance,
he dropped one grenade with such faultless precision, that, striking
its mark, an explosion rent the Serapis like a volcano. The long row of
heaped cartridges was ignited. The fire ran horizontally, like an
express on a railway. More than twenty men were instantly killed:
nearly forty wounded. This blow restored the chances of battle, before
in favor of the Serapis.
But the drooping spirits of the English were suddenly revived, by an
event which crowned the scene by an act on the part of one of the
consorts of the Richard, the incredible atrocity of which has induced
all humane minds to impute it rather to some incomprehensible mistake
than to the malignant madness of the perpetrator.
The cautious approach and retreat of a consort of the Serapis, the
Scarborough, before the moon rose, has already been mentioned. It is
now to be related how that, when the moon was more than an hour high, a
consort of the Richard, the Alliance, likewise approached and
retreated. This ship, commanded by a Frenchman, infamous in his own
navy, and obnoxious in the service to which he at present belonged;
this ship, foremost in insurgency to Paul hitherto, and which, for the
most part, had crept like a poltroon from the fray; the Alliance now
was at hand. Seeing her, Paul deemed the battle at an end. But to his
horror, the Alliance threw a broadside full into the stern of the
Richard, without touching the Serapis. Paul called to her, for God’s
sake to forbear destroying the Richard. The reply was, a second, a
third, a fourth broadside, striking the Richard ahead, astern, and
amidships. One of the volleys killed several men and one officer.
Meantime, like carpenters’ augers, and the sea-worm called Remora, the
guns of the Serapis were drilling away at the same doomed hull. After
performing her nameless exploit, the Alliance sailed away, and did no
more. She was like the great fire of London, breaking out on the heel
of the great Plague. By this time, the Richard had so many shot-holes
low down in her hull, that like a sieve she began to settle.
“Do you strike?” cried the English captain.
“I have not yet begun to fight,” howled sinking Paul.
This summons and response were whirled on eddies of smoke and flame.
Both vessels were now on fire. The men of either knew hardly which to
do; strive to destroy the enemy, or save themselves. In the midst of
this, one hundred human beings, hitherto invisible strangers, were
suddenly added to the rest. Five score English prisoners, till now
confined in the Richard’s hold, liberated in his consternation by the
master at arms, burst up the hatchways. One of them, the captain of a
letter of marque, captured by Paul, off the Scottish coast, crawled
through a port, as a burglar through a window, from the one ship to the
other, and reported affairs to the English captain.
While Paul and his lieutenants were confronting these prisoners, the
gunner, running up from below, and not perceiving his official
superiors, and deeming them dead, believing himself now left sole
surviving officer, ran to the tower of Pisa to haul down the colors.
But they were already shot down and trailing in the water astern, like
a sailor’s towing shirt. Seeing the gunner there, groping about in the
smoke, Israel asked what he wanted.
At this moment the gunner, rushing to the rail, shouted “Quarter!
quarter!” to the Serapis.
“I’ll quarter ye,” yelled Israel, smiting the gunner with the flat of
his cutlass.
“Do you strike?” now came from the Serapis.
“Aye, aye, aye!” involuntarily cried Israel, fetching the gunner a
shower of blows.
“Do you strike?” again was repeated from the Serapis; whose captain,
judging from the augmented confusion on board the Richard, owing to the
escape of the prisoners, and also influenced by the report made to him
by his late guest of the port-hole, doubted not that the enemy must
needs be about surrendering.
“Do you strike?”
“Aye!—I strike _back_” roared Paul, for the first time now hearing the
summons.
But judging this frantic response to come, like the others, from some
unauthorized source, the English captain directed his boarders to be
called, some of whom presently leaped on the Richard’s rail, but,
throwing out his tattooed arm at them, with a sabre at the end of it,
Paul showed them how boarders repelled boarders. The English retreated,
but not before they had been thinned out again, like spring radishes,
by the unfaltering fire from the Richard’s tops.
An officer of the Richard, seeing the mass of prisoners delirious with
sudden liberty and fright, pricked them with his sword to the pumps,
thus keeping the ship afloat by the very blunder which had promised to
have been fatal. The vessels now blazed so in the rigging that both
parties desisted from hostilities to subdue the common foe.
When some faint order was again restored upon the Richard her chances
of victory increased, while those of the English, driven under cover,
proportionably waned. Early in the contest, Paul, with his own hand,
had brought one of his largest guns to bear against the enemy’s
mainmast. That shot had hit. The mast now plainly tottered.
Nevertheless, it seemed as if, in this fight, neither party could be
victor. Mutual obliteration from the face of the waters seemed the only
natural sequel to hostilities like these. It is, therefore, honor to
him as a man, and not reproach to him as an officer, that, to stay such
carnage, Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, with his own hands hauled
down his colors. But just as an officer from the Richard swung himself
on board the Serapis, and accosted the English captain, the first
lieutenant of the Serapis came up from below inquiring whether the
Richard had struck, since her fire had ceased.
So equal was the conflict that, even after the surrender, it could be,
and was, a question to one of the warriors engaged (who had not
happened to see the English flag hauled down) whether the Serapis had
struck to the Richard, or the Richard to the Serapis. Nay, while the
Richard’s officer was still amicably conversing with the English
captain, a midshipman of the Richard, in act of following his superior
on board the surrendered vessel, was run through the thigh by a pike in
the hand of an ignorant boarder of the Serapis. While, equally
ignorant, the cannons below deck were still thundering away at the
nominal conqueror from the batteries of the nominally conquered ship.
But though the Serapis had submitted, there were two misanthropical
foes on board the Richard which would not so easily succumb—fire and
water. All night the victors were engaged in suppressing the flames.
Not until daylight were the flames got under; but though the pumps were
kept continually going, the water in the hold still gained. A few hours
after sunrise the Richard was deserted for the Serapis and the other
vessels of the squadron of Paul. About ten o’clock the Richard, gorged
with slaughter, wallowed heavily, gave a long roll, and blasted by
tornadoes of sulphur, slowly sunk, like Gomorrah, out of sight.
The loss of life in the two ships was about equal; one-half of the
total number of those engaged being either killed or wounded.
In view of this battle one may ask—What separates the enlightened man
from the savage? Is civilization a thing distinct, or is it an advanced
stage of barbarism?