PAGE 7
Jack Ballister’s Fortunes
by
“Well, then,” said Mr. Maynard, “we’ll make shift to work in as best we may by ourselves. ‘Twill be high tide against one o’clock. We’ll run in then with sail as far as we can, and then we’ll send you ahead with the boat to sound for a pass, and we’ll follow with the sweeps. You know the waters pretty well, you say.”
“They were saying ashore that the villain hath forty men aboard,” said the boatswain.[2]
[Footnote 2: The pirate captain had really only twenty-five men aboard of his sloop at the time of the battle.]
Lieutenant Maynard’s force consisted of thirty-five men in the schooner and twenty-five men in the sloop. He carried neither cannons nor carronades, and neither of his vessels was very well fitted for the purpose for which they were designed. The schooner, which he himself commanded, offered almost no protection to the crew. The rail was not more than a foot high in the waist, and the men on the deck were almost entirely exposed. The rail of the sloop was perhaps a little higher, but it, too, was hardly better adapted for fighting. Indeed, the lieutenant depended more upon the moral force of official authority to overawe the pirates than upon any real force of arms or men. He never believed, until the very last moment, that the pirates would show any real fight. It is very possible that they might not have done so had they not thought that the lieutenant had actually no legal right supporting him in his attack upon them in North Carolina waters.
It was about noon when anchor was hoisted, and, with the schooner leading, both vessels ran slowly in before a light wind that had begun to blow toward midday. In each vessel a man stood in the bows, sounding continually with lead and line. As they slowly opened up the harbor within the inlet, they could see the pirate sloop lying about three miles away. There was a boat just putting off from it to the shore.
The lieutenant and his sailing master stood together on the roof of the cabin deckhouse. The sailing master held a glass to his eye. “She carries a long gun, sir,” he said, “and four carronades. She’ll be hard to beat, sir, I do suppose, armed as we are with only light arms for close fighting.”
The lieutenant laughed. “Why, Brookes,” he said, “you seem to think forever of these men showing fight. You don’t know them as I know them. They have a deal of bluster and make a deal of noise, but when you seize them and hold them with a strong hand, there’s naught of fight left in them. ‘Tis like enough there ‘ll not be so much as a musket fired to-day. I’ve had to do with ’em often enough before to know my gentlemen well by this time.” Nor, as was said, was it until the very last that the lieutenant could be brought to believe that the pirates had any stomach for a fight.
The two vessels had reached perhaps within a mile of the pirate sloop before they found the water too shallow to venture any farther with the sail. It was then that the boat was lowered as the lieutenant had planned, and the boatswain went ahead to sound, the two vessels, with their sails still hoisted but empty of wind, pulling in after with sweeps.
The pirate had also hoisted sail, but lay as though waiting for the approach of the schooner and the sloop.
The boat in which the boatswain was sounding had run in a considerable distance ahead of the two vessels, which were gradually creeping up with the sweeps until they had reached to within less than half a mile of the pirates–the boat with the boatswain maybe a quarter of a mile closer. Suddenly there was a puff of smoke from the pirate sloop, and then another and another, and the next moment there came the three reports of muskets up the wind.