I sprang up the quarter-deck ladder to observe what followed, and beheld sure enough, the towering outline of Vanderdecken standing at the rail that protected the fore-part of the poop-deck gazing down upon the schooner with his arms folded and his attitude expressing a lifelessness not to be conveyed by the pen, though the greatest of living artists in words ventured it. Against the side were the two mates and Jans looking on at a scene to whose stir, clamour, excitement, they seemed to oppose deaf ears and insensible eyes. Small wonder that the Frenchmen should have fled to my shout, fronted and backed as they were in that part of the ship into which they had leapt, and where they had come to an affrighted stand, by the grisly and sable shapes of Vanderdecken and his comrades aft, and by the groups of leprous-tinctured anatomies forward. I peered over the rail. The two vessels lay grinding together, and as the tall fabric of the Death Ship leaned to the schooner, you thought she would crush and beat her down, but with the regularity of a pulse the dark folds of water swept the little vessel clear, sometimes raising her when our ship lay aslant to the level of our upper deck, and giving me, therefore, a mighty good prospect of what was happening in her. Both vessels were off the wind and were surging through it with a prodigious hissing betwixt their sides. The fright of the boarders had proved contagious. I shall never forget the sight! Small as the schooner was, there could not have been less than ninety men on her decks, and they made a very hell of the atmosphere about them with the raving notes in their cries and bawlings. My knowledge of French was small, but some of their screams I could follow, as for instance: "'Tis the Flying Dutchman!" "Cut us adrift! Cut us adrift!" "Flatten in those head-sheets! Shove her off! Shove her off! Pole her, my children, with a couple of sweeps!" "Now she starts. No! What holds her? Ha! ha! the weather topsail-brace has fouled the Hollander's fore-topsail yard-arm. No use going aloft! Let go of it--let go of it--that it may overhaul itself!" Imagine about four-score throats--some with the guttural thickness of the negro's utterance--all together roaring and delivering orders such as those of which I have given you specimens! Figure the decks throbbing with men rushing with apparent aimlessness from one side to the other, from one end to the other--not a vestige of discipline among them--a drowning yell or two coming up from between the ships where some wretch that had fallen overboard was holding on--the sails shaking, the water washing beyond in a glaring white that gave a startling distinctness to the shape of the schooner as she rose softly to the level of our upper deck bulwarks upon the seething snow!