paddled five fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He
had no chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the boat with a
rifle, and he shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew
close many of us were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.

"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were
forty feet away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick
of dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and
another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now
that he must have split the ends of the fuses and stuck in match
heads, because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very
short. Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of
them went off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a canoe,
that canoe was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed
to pieces. The canoe I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men
who sat next to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes
turned and ran away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us.
Also he went at us again with his rifle, so that many were killed
through the back as they fled away. And all the time the black boys in
the boat went on rowing. You see, I told you true, that mate was hell.

"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire,
and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at
one time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the
fire, heaving up water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So
that all we had fought for was lost to us, besides many more of us
being killed. Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in
which I hear that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he
yells, Yah! Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were killed.