Down they swooped, one on the right, one on
the left, the sides and shrouds black with men and bristling with
weapons. In heavy clusters they hung upon the forecastle all
ready for a spring-faces white, faces brown, faces yellow, and
faces black, fair Norsemen, swarthy Italians, fierce rovers from
the Levant, and fiery Moors from the Barbary States, of all hues
and countries, and marked solely by the common stamp of a
wild-beast ferocity. Rasping up on either side, with oars
trailing to save them from snapping, they poured in a living
torrent with horrid yell and shrill whoop upon the defenceless
merchantman.
But wilder yet was the cry, and shriller still the scream, when
there rose up from the shadow of those silent bulwarks the long
lines of the English bowmen, and the arrows whizzed in a deadly
sleet among the unprepared masses upon the pirate decks. From
the higher sides of the cog the bowmen could shoot straight down,
at a range which was so short as to enable a cloth-yard shaft to
pierce through mail-coats or to transfix a shield, though it were
an inch thick of toughened wood.
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