The boats had not so much as a single gun among them, their crew being armed simply with cutlass, pistol, and musket; I therefore felt no apprehension at all concerning the result of the coming conflict, but rather a somewhat unaccountable pity for the unfortunate wretches who seemed to be quite unaware that they were advancing to their doom. But this singular feeling of pity was quickly swamped by the reflection of the fate that would certainly be ours, should we by any chance be foolish enough to let the pirates get the better of us; and since it was important that we should make the utmost of our opportunities, I gave orders for the four guns to be loaded with grape and carefully aimed at the four largest boats. This was done, and the four pieces spoke their deadly message almost simultaneously, the smoke momentarily obscuring our vision, while the thunder of the discharge echoed and re-echoed round the cliffs in a long series of slowly decreasing reverberations. But long before these had died away the breeze had swept aside the pall of smoke that hid the boats from us, and we saw that, so carefully had the guns been aimed, each shot had taken effect, the four boats at which they had been discharged being now mere shapeless masses of wreckage, among which a few men struggled, here and there, to keep themselves afloat. The casualties among the pirates must have been appalling, for I estimated that those four boats, being the largest in the entire flotilla, must have contained at least half the total number of men comprising the expedition, and, so far as I could ascertain, with the aid of my telescope, the survivors of the four crews scarcely numbered a dozen in all! Of course the nearest boats at once closed in upon the wreckage, with the object of rescuing those few survivors, and in so doing some half-a-dozen of them became bunched close together for about a minute. Such an opportunity was too good to be missed, and our guns having meanwhile been smartly loaded again, two of them were brought to bear upon the bunch, and simultaneously discharged. The result of these two shots was scarcely as effective as that of the previous discharge-- possibly because the gun-captains had become a little flurried and excited--nevertheless two of the boats aimed at were blown to pieces, while two or three of the others showed signs of more or less serious damage, and the occupants were thrown into such dire confusion that, abandoning all further effort to save their comrades, they took to their oars and seemed intent only upon getting apart as quickly as possible, an example which was immediately followed by the remaining boats, the crews of which opened out until there was at least a couple of fathoms of clear water separating boat from boat.