Eighteen guns from each of her
flanks emptied themselves at that point-blank range into the hulls of
the two Spanish vessels.
Half stunned by that reverberating thunder, and thrown off her
balance by the sudden lurch of the ship under her feet, Miss Bishop
hurtled violently against Lord Julian, who kept his feet only by
clutching the rail on which he had been leaning. Billowing clouds
of smoke to starboard blotted out everything, and its acrid odour,
taking them presently in the throat, set them gasping and coughing.
From the grim confusion and turmoil in the waist below arose a
clamour of fierce Spanish blasphemies and the screams of maimed men.
The Milagrosa staggered slowly ahead, a gaping rent in her bulwarks;
her foremast was shattered, fragments of the yards hanging in the
netting spread below. Her beak-head was in splinters, and a shot
had smashed through into the great cabin, reducing it to wreckage.
Don Miguel was bawling orders wildly, and peering ever and anon
through the curtain of smoke that was drifting slowly astern, in
his anxiety to ascertain how it might have fared with the Hidalga.
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