"Boarders, away fore and aft!" cried Sir Andrew Wood, through his trumpet, as he stood above the clouds of smoke at the edge of the poop, towering like an iron statue, while the chain-plates crashed as the ponderous hulls sheered alongside of each other in rasping collision; and in hundreds the boarders swarmed on the bulwarks, while the English grappling-irons clutched the Scottish ships, whose sailors worked side by side with the foe, in lashing the shrouds together below and the yard-arms aloft, until the six vessels formed, as it were, one broad platform, for a scene of melancholy butchery, which we have but little heart and less taste for describing. The Scottish mariners, armed with their two-handed swords and Jedwood axes, and all accoutred in steel caps and jacks or doublets of escaupill, led by Sir Andrew Wood on one side, poured from the bows and sprit-sail yard of the _Yellow Frigate_ upon the decks of the _Harry_, and drove the enemy across the forecastle and along the larboard gangway, while Barton, sheathed in full armour and wielding a deadly ghisarma in both hands, led another band through the fire, smoke, and infernal uproar, hewing a passage, hilt to hilt, to the forecastle of the other ship, desperately forcing a passage through a hedge of gallant billmen, into the waist. The crew of the _Queen Margaret_, under Sir Alexander Mathieson, after succeeding in repelling the English boarders, were similarly employed elsewhere; and there, under that placid summer moon, were Englishmen and Scot fighting like tigers, all mingled in a wild _melée_, while their firmly-grappled ships were committed to the mercy of the waves and currents. Save the flash and boom of a cannon or saker from the poops, or the bang of a pistolette or arquebuse from the tops, there were no other sounds heard now, but the rasp of steel gleaming on steel, the twang of the English bows, and the crash of the Scottish axes oh helmets and bills; the cries and shrieks of the wounded, and the yells of pain and defiance, drowned in a gurgle, as many a man was driven, fighting, overboard, and drowned or crushed to death between the grappled ships. The decks were encumbered by killed and wounded, and repeatedly the Scots were driven back over their own bulwarks, and had to fight the English on the decks of Wood and Mathieson. "St Andrew! St. Andrew! A Wood! a Wood!" on one side, were met by "St. George for England!" on the other, mingled with many a furious epithet and ferocious expression of that deep-rooted national animosity, which the infamous wars of the Plantagenets had created between two nations, who, if allied, might then--as they have since--defied the world in arms. Overhead the arquebussiers blazed at each other from the tops, and sent an occasional bullet into the mass of combatants below.