“Do you call for quarter?” shouted Captain Pearson, who had heard the cry. “Never!” replied John Paul Jones. “Then I’ll give you none,” replied Pearson, and the fight went on, while Jones sent his resourceful lieutenant, Richard Dale, below to see why the cartridges of powder were no longer coming up, for neither he nor Dale at this moment knew that the prisoners had been released. But when he saw the condition of affairs below, Dale, instead of quailing, with ready wit told the prisoners that the _Serapis_ was just sinking and their only hope of life was in keeping the _Bonhomme Richard_ afloat. At this the whole mob of them went to the pumps and to fighting the fire. They worked in gangs till they dropped from sheer exhaustion, when other gangs took their places. There was one of them--a captain of a captured ship--who did not believe the story. He climbed through the ports to the _Serapis_ and told of the hopeless condition of the American crew. But his story was discredited because of an extraordinary occurrence on the _Serapis_. As the ships lay together the mainyard of the _Bonhomme Richard_ stretched fair over the main hatch of the _Serapis_. Noticing this fact, a bright marine in the maintop of the _Bonhomme Richard_ took advantage of it. The marines in the tops had been of the utmost service in clearing the decks of the enemy already, but this man, with a leather bucket of hand grenades and a candle, climbed out on the mainyard until over the hatch of the _Serapis_, and then, securing his bucket to the sheet-block, he began dropping the lighted grenades into her hold. The hand grenade is a shell near the weight of a baseball. The first one he dropped exploded on a great heap of gun cartridges that had accumulated along the lower deck behind the guns. A tremendous explosion followed. “It was awful! Some twenty of our men were fairly blown to pieces. There were other men who were stripped naked, with nothing on but the collars of their shirts and wristbands. Farther aft there was not so much powder, perhaps, and the men were scorched or burned more than they were wounded. I do not know how I escaped, but I do know that there was hardly a man forward of my guns who did escape.” So wrote Captain Heddart, already quoted. The explosion also set the _Serapis_ on fire. [Illustration: Paul Jones Capturing the _Serapis_. _From an engraving of the picture by Chappel._]