No time to save sailors ashore! The blazing rafts had already bumped keels with the moored fleet. No chance to raise anchors! The Spanish frigates were already abreast in a life-and-death grapple, soldiers boarding the English decks, sabring the crews, hurling hand grenades down the hatches to blow up the powder magazines. Hawkins roared "to cut the cables." It was a hand-to-hand slaughter on decks slippery with blood. No light but the musketry fire and glare of burning masts! The little English company were fighting like a wild beast trapped, when with a {138} thunderclap that tore bottom out of hull--Hawkins's ship flew into mid-air, a flaring, fiery wreck--then sank in the heaving trough of the sea, carrying down five hundred Spaniards to a watery grave. Cutlass in hand, head over heels went Hawkins into the sea. The hell of smoke, of flaming mast poles, of blazing musketry, of churning waters--hid him. Then a rope's end flung out by some friend gave handhold. He was up the sides of a ship, that had cut hawsers and off before the fire-rafts came! Sails were hoisted to the seaward breeze. In the carnage of fire and blood, the Spaniards did not see the two smallest English vessels scudding before the wind as if fiend-chased. Every light on the decks was put out. Then the dark of the tropic night hid them. Without food, without arms, with scarcely a remnant of their crews--the two ships drifted to sea. Not a man of the sailors ashore escaped. All were butchered, or taken prisoners for a fate worse than butchery--to be torn apart in the market-place of Vera Cruz, baited in the streets to the yells of on-lookers, hung by the arms to out-of-doors scaffolding to die by inches, or be torn by vultures. The two ships at sea were in terrible plight. North, west, south was the Spanish foe. Food there was none. The crews ate the dogs, monkeys, parrots on board. Then they set traps for the rats of the hold. The starving seamen begged to be marooned. They would risk Spanish cruelty to escape starvation. Hawkins landed {139} three-quarters of the remnant crews either in Yucatan or Florida. Then he crept lamely back to England, where he moored in January, 1569.