'"The engineer stayed on deck while the men went down below. The skipper
hadn't got back to the chart-room before I saw thirty feet of bowsprit
hanging over the break of the fo'c'sle. Thirty feet of bowsprit, sir,
doesn't belong to anything that sails the seas except a sailing-ship
or a man-of-war. I speculated quite a long time, with my hands on the
bulwarks, as to whether our friend was soft wood or steel plated. It
would not have made much difference to us, anyway; but I felt there
was more honour in being rammed, you know. Then I knew all about it.
It was a ram. We opened out. I am not exaggerating--we opened out,
sir, like a cardboard box. The other ship cut us two-thirds through,
a little behind the break of the fo'c'sle. Our decks split up
lengthways. The mizzen-mast bounded out of its place, and we heeled
over. Then the other ship blew a fog-horn. I remember thinking, as I
took water from the port bulwark, that this was rather ostentatious
after she had done all the mischief. After that, I was a mile and a
half under sea, trying to go to sleep as hard as I could. Some one
caught hold of my hair, and waked me up. I was hanging to what was
left of one of our boats under the lee of a large English ironclad.
There were two men with me; the three of us began to yell. A man on
the ship sings out, 'Can you climb on board if we throw you a rope?'
They weren't going to let down a fine new man-of-war's boat to pick
up three half-drowned rats. We accepted the invitation. We climbed--I,
the engineer, and the ship's boy. About half an hour later the fog
cleared entirely; except for the half of the boat away in the offing,
there was neither stick nor string on the sea to show that the _Hespa_
had been cut down."

'And what do you think of that now?' said the man from Saigon.