A hundred men made a rush over the gunwales into the Serapis with gleaming swords, exploding pistols, and the loudest outcries which frenzy could extort. In such hours of blood and terror, shrieks aid to embolden the heart and nerve the arm. They were met by an equal number of the foe, with pike, sabre, pistol, and corresponding yells. What imagination can conceive the scene? In midnight darkness, illumined only by war’s portentous flashes, enveloped in sulphurous smoke, with the crash as of ten thousand thunders deafening the ear, more than seven hundred men, crowded together in closest contact, and wielding the most powerful weapons modern art could construct, were butchering each other. Limb was torn from limb. Dead bodies strewed the decks, which were slippery with blood. Shrieks and groans and prayers and oaths were blended with the horrid clamor. Can hell itself present a scene more infernal than this. And who shall answer for this at God’s bar? If Abraham was right in arming three hundred and eighteen men to pursue the savages for the rescue of his nephew Lot, and his family, and if he could look for God’s blessing upon the enterprise, as he certainly could, then were these colonies justified in resisting, even to this direful extremity, the attempts of haughty England to enslave our land. The burglar who breaks into the peaceful dwelling at midnight, to rob and murder, may be justly resisted with every weapon which frenzy can grasp. The British government must answer at the Judgment Seat, for these scenes of blood and woe. Truly did Captain Jones write to Lady Selkirk. “Humanity starts back from such scenes of horror, and cannot sufficiently execrate the vile promoters of the detestable war. “For _they_; ’twas _they_ unsheathed the ruthless blade, And Heaven shall ask the havoc it has made.” The boarders were driven back. Leaving many dead upon the deck of the Serapis, they were forced, pell-mell, over the gunwales, with many a gory wound, to the blood-stained decks of the Richard. As they fled, the two captains, each on his quarter-deck, stood within a few feet of each other. In the darkness the flags could not be seen. Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, shouted out: “Have you struck your flag?”