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| TELL the story to your sons | |
| Of the gallant days of yore, | |
| When the brig of seven guns | |
| Fought the fleet of seven score, | |
| From the set of sun till morn, through the long September night— | 5 |
| Ninety men against two thousand, and the ninety won the fight | |
| In the harbor of Fayal the Azore. | |
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| Three lofty British ships came a-sailing to Fayal: | |
| One was a line-of-battle ship, and two were frigates tall; | |
| Nelson’s valiant men of war, brave as Britons ever are, | 10 |
| Manned the guns they served so well at Aboukir and Trafalgar. | |
| Lord Dundonald and his fleet at Jamaica far away | |
| Waited eager for their coming, fretted sore at their delay. | |
| There was loot for British valor on the Mississippi coast | |
| In the beauty and the booty that the Creole cities boast; | 15 |
| There were rebel knaves to swing, there were prisoners to bring | |
| Home in fetters to old England for the glory of the King! | |
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| At the setting of the sun and the ebbing of the tide | |
| Came the great ships one by one, with their portals opened wide, | |
| And their cannon frowning down on the castle and the town | 20 |
| And the privateer that lay close inside; | |
| Came the eighteen-gun Carnation, and the Rota, forty-four, | |
| And the triple-decked Plantagenet an admiral’s pennon bore; | |
| And the privateer grew smaller as their topmasts towered taller, | |
| And she bent her springs and anchored by the castle on the shore. | 25 |
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| Spake the noble Portuguese to the stranger: “Have no fear; | |
| They are neutral waters these, and your ship is sacred here | |
| As if fifty stout armadas stood to shelter you from harm, | |
| For the honor of the Briton will defend you from his arm.” | |
| But the privateersman said, “Well we know the Englishmen, | 30 |
| And their faith is written red in the Dartmoor slaughter pen. | |
| Come what fortune God may send, we will fight them to the end, | |
| And the mercy of the sharks may spare us then.” | |
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| “Seize the pirate where she lies!” cried the English admiral: | |
| “If the Portuguese protect her, all the worse for Portugal!” | 35 |
| And four launches at his bidding leaped impatient for the fray, | |
| Speeding shoreward where the Armstrong, grim and dark and ready, lay. | |
| Twice she hailed and gave them warning; but the feeble menace scorning, | |
| On they came in splendid silence, till a cable’s length away— | |
| Then the Yankee pivot spoke; Pico’s thousand echoes woke; | 40 |
| And four baffled, beaten launches drifted helpless on the bay. | |
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| Then the wrath of Lloyd arose till the lion roared again, | |
| And he called out all his launches and he called five hundred men; | |
| And he gave the word “No quarter!” and he sent them forth to smite. | |
| Heaven help the foe before him when the Briton comes in might! | 45 |
| Heaven helped the little Armstrong in her hour of bitter need; | |
| God Almighty nerved the heart and guided well the arm of Reid. | |
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| Launches to port and starboard, launches forward and aft, | |
| Fourteen launches together striking the little craft. | |
| They hacked at the boarding-nettings, they swarmed above the rail; | 50 |
| But the Long Tom roared from his pivot and the grape-shot fell like hail: | |
| Pike and pistol and cutlass, and hearts that knew not fear, | |
| Bulwarks of brawn and mettle, guarded the privateer. | |
| And ever where fight was fiercest, the form of Reid was seen; | |
| Ever where foes drew nearest, his quick sword fell between. | 55 |
| Once in the deadly strife | |
| The boarders’ leader pressed | |
| Forward of all the rest | |
| Challenging life for life; | |
| But ere their blades had crossed, | 60 |
| A dying sailor tossed | |
| His pistol to Reid, and cried, | |
| “Now riddle the lubber’s hide!” | |
| But the privateersman laughed, and flung the weapon aside, | |
| And he drove his blade to the hilt, and the foeman gasped and died. | 65 |
| Then the boarders took to their launches laden with hurt and dead, | |
| But little with glory burdened, and out of the battle fled. | |
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| Now the tide was at flood again, and the night was almost done, | |
| When the sloop-of-war came up with her odds of two to one, | |
| And she opened fire; but the Armstrong answered her, gun for gun, | 70 |
| And the gay Carnation wilted in half an hour of sun. | |
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| Then the Armstrong, looking seaward, saw the mighty seventy-four, | |
| With her triple tier of cannon, drawing slowly to the shore. | |
| And the dauntless captain said: “Take our wounded and our dead, | |
| Bear them tenderly to land, for the Armstrong’s days are o’er; | 75 |
| But no foe shall tread her deck, and no flag above it wave— | |
| To the ship that saved our honor we will give a shipman’s grave.” | |
| So they did as he commanded, and they bore their mates to land | |
| With the figurehead of Armstrong and the good sword in his hand. | |
| Then they turned the Long Tom downward, and they pierced her oaken side, | 80 |
| And they cheered her, and they blessed her, and they sunk her in the tide. | |
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| Tell the story to your sons, | |
| When the haughty stranger boasts | |
| Of his mighty ships and guns | |
| And the muster of his hosts, | 85 |
| How the word of God was witnessed in the gallant days of yore | |
| When the twenty fled from one ere the rising of the sun, | |
| In the harbor of Fayal the Azore! | |
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