the Netherland ships into action--several of the smaller ones having been
purposely stationed by Heemskerk on the edge of the bay to prevent the
possible escape of any of the Spaniards. While some of these distant
ships were crowding sail, in order to come to closer quarters, now that
the day seemed going against the Spaniards, a tremendous explosion
suddenly shook the air. One of the largest galleons, engaged in combat
with a couple of Dutch vessels, had received a hot shot full in her
powder magazine, and blew up with all on board. The blazing fragments
drifted about among the other ships, and two more were soon on fire,
their guns going off and their magazines exploding. The rock of
Gibraltar seemed to reel. To the murky darkness succeeded the
intolerable glare of a new and vast conflagration. The scene in that
narrow roadstead was now almost infernal. It seemed, said an eye-
witness, as if heaven and earth were passing away. A hopeless panic
seized the Spaniards. The battle was over. The St. Augustine still lay
in the deadly embrace of her antagonists, but all the other galleons were
sunk or burned. Several of the lesser war-ships had also been destroyed.
It was nearly sunset. The St. Augustine at last ran up a white flag, but
it was not observed in the fierceness of the last moments of combat; the
men from the bolus and the Tiger making a simultaneous rush on board the
vanquished foe.

The fight was done, but the massacre was at its beginning. The
trumpeter, of Captain Kleinsorg clambered like a monkey up the mast of
the St. Augustine, hauled down the admiral's flag, the last which was
still waving, and gained the hundred florins. The ship was full of dead
and dying; but a brutal, infamous butchery now took place. Some
Netherland prisoners were found in the hold, who related that two
messengers had been successively despatched to take their lives, as they
lay there in chains, and that each had been shot, as he made his way