Sea of Glory

the night before, with the dirt piled up in front to form a four-foot-wide parapet. Natives were already standing in the ditch, with only their heads exposed, prepared to fire their muskets and shoot their arrows through narrow openings in the palisade.
    Several chiefs, distinguishable by their white headdresses, stood outside the stockade, taunting the sailors as they approached. A Congreve war rocket was fired, followed by a volley of gunfire, and the natives quickly retreated into the fort. Waving their spears and clubs in the air, the villagers behind the stockade shouted out, “Lako-mai!” or “Come on!”
    Ringgold wanted to avoid a direct assault, preferring instead to fire on the fort from a distance in hopes of setting the village aflame with a rocket. Unfortunately, Robert Johnson didn’t learn this until some of the people in his division, led by George Sinclair, had already begun to storm the barricade. Sinclair scurried across a narrow causeway that led to a gate. There he saw a warrior about to hurl a long spear. “I gave him the contents of the left barrel of my gun,” Sinclair wrote, “fifteen buckshot, which sent him to Kingdom Come.”
    Ringgold shouted out to Sinclair to return, but Sinclair quickly realized that the gate he had partially entered was constructed like a fish weir—it was easy enough to get in, but getting out was a different matter. He also realized he would be more exposed to enemy fire by retreating back across the causeway than by staying close under the stockade. He could see the natives, “thick as pigs,” in the ditch on the other side of the palisade. “The bullets from our men were pouring in thro the Stockade as thick as hail,” Sinclair wrote, “but the natives were in a measure protected by this inner ditch.” In addition to warriors firing muskets, there were women with bows and arrows. An arrow glanced off a gatepost and struck Sinclair on the lapel of his jacket, but caused him no injury.
    He had an easy shot at a native just four feet inside the gate, but when he fired his gun, the native dropped down to the ground, and the ball passed over his right shoulder. Sinclair had heard rumors that the Fijians could dodge a musket ball, and now he knew they were true. When the native sprang back to his feet, William Hayes, captain of the maintop aboard the Porpoise, was waiting for him and stabbed the native in the eye with his bayonet.
    The action continued at a frantic pace, the air filled with the crackle of gunfire and the angry sizzle of Congreve rockets. Sinclair had just shot a native with his pistol when someone shouted out that a warrior was about to throw a short club at him. He ducked and the club ricocheted off a nearby gatepost. Before the native could get a second club out of the maro tied around his waist, Sinclair fired his pistol, and the native dropped to the ground. Suddenly there was much shouting and confusion within the fort as several warriors carried the native’s body to a nearby hut. Sinclair later learned that he had killed the chief of Sualib.
    All the while, sailors were coming up to the gate, two by two, and firing into the village as Ringgold continued to pepper the village with rockets, but to little effect. About fifteen minutes into the battle, a rocket hit the thatched roof of one of the houses and burst into flame. If the fire should spread, the village would soon become an inferno. A warrior climbed up onto the roof and attempted to dislodge the rocket, but more than a dozen guns were quickly trained on him, and he fell, his body riddled with musket balls.
    Soon the fire was spreading throughout the village. An interpreter shouted out that all the women and children would be allowed to escape out the rear gate. As the flames increased, the warriors were forced to abandon the inner ditch, which exposed them to unrelenting fire from the sailors’ muskets. Sinclair’s double-barrel gun became so hot that he couldn’t touch the barrel. “The scene was grand, and beautiful and at the same time horrible,” he wrote, “what with the volleys of musketry, the crackling of the flames, the squealing of the Pigs . . . , the shouting of men and women and the crying of children. The noise was deafening, above which you could hear rising now and then, the loud cheers of our men with ‘There they go,’ ‘Down with them,’ ‘Shoot that fellow,’ etc. etc.”
    A weeping girl was seen stumbling about the village with her arms