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 the
bulwark. The captain had lit a pipe of tobacco, and he stood now in the
bright moonlight close to the rail, with his hands behind him, looking
out ahead with the utmost coolness imaginable, and paying no more
attention to the din of battle than though it were twenty leagues away.
Now and then he would take his pipe from his lips to utter an order to
the man at the wheel. Excepting this he stood there hardly moving at
all, the wind blowing his long red hair over his shoulders.

Had it not been for the armed galley the pirates might have got the
galleon away with no great harm done in spite of all this cannonading,
for the man-of-war which rode at anchor nighest to them at the mouth