The negroes confined in the hold of the Maraposa, frantic from their confinement and suffering, and finding the crew had left her, succeeded in breaking their bonds, and rushed on deck, wild with delight at being loose, and burning for revenge, they threw overboard the few men left in charge of the schooner, and hearing the conflict on the brig, some sixty of them, armed with handspikes, iron belaying-pins, monkey-tails,[1] and whatever they could pick up, came tumbling on board, and falling upon the rear of the slavers, with unearthly and savage noises, they threw them into great disorder, and created a diversion in favor of the man-of-war’s men, which they were not slow in taking advantage of, and with a loud hurrah, they charged over the Maraposas, and thought the day was already theirs; but the negroes, who had only attacked the slavers because they met them first as they came over the bow, knew no difference in the white men; and as the brig’s crew came within their reach, were assaulted as fiercely as the slavers; and not until every African had been slain, or forced overboard, was the brig once more in the possession of her own crew. The Maraposa, after the men in charge of her were thrown overboard, had forged clear of the brig, and was now drifting about, sometimes with her sails full, and then all aback, some quarter of a mile off—the negroes dancing, jumping, and fighting on her deck like a drove of monkeys. Willis, who, looking around when the slaves first fell upon his men to see what was the matter, had received a severe blow on the back of his head from a cutlas. His hat turning the edge, he was only stunned by the force of the blow, and gradually recovering his senses, he raised himself on his elbow. At first his mind wandered, and he did not recollect where he was; but soon the familiar faces of many of his own men, and the bodies of the English sailors who lay around him, covered with ghastly wounds, and stiff in the cold embrace of death; the groans of the wounded, as they were borne past him, on their way to the cockpit, recalled vividly to his imagination his melancholy situation. Rising to his feet, and looking around, he found that, for the present at least, his position was nearly hopeless. Scarce half a dozen of his men had escaped with life, his vessel out of his reach, and he a prisoner to those from whom he did not expect civil treatment; then with the certainty, nearly, of the dangling noose, and foreyard-arm in the future.