As the last words left my lips the leading canoes dashed alongside, and the next instant some thirty or forty savages could be seen scrambling over the bulwarks and leaping down on the main-deck.  They seemed somewhat disconcerted at finding no one to oppose them, and paused irresolutely as though not quite knowing what to do, and perhaps fearing a trap of some sort.  Meanwhile others came close upon their heels; while the general and his volunteers suddenly found their hands full in repelling an attack upon the poop by way of the mizzen chains.  As for that part of the crew that had retired to the poop at my order, I formed them up along the fore end of the structure; and now, as, one after another, they reloaded their muskets, they and their comrades on the topgallant-forecastle opened a brisk, if somewhat irregular, fire upon the multitude of savages who came pouring in over the bulwarks into the waist of the ship.  By the light of the musketry flashes I saw several of the savages throw up their arms and fall to the deck--so many of them, indeed, in proportion to the number of shots fired, that I felt convinced many of the bullets must be doing double or triple duty.  But for every savage who fell at least half a dozen fresh ones came in over the bulwarks to take his place, and I soon recognised that such musketry fire as ours must be absolutely ineffectual to deal with the overwhelming odds brought against us.  And how warmly I congratulated myself that I had not been foolish enough to attempt anything like a systematic defence of the waist of the ship.  Had I done that we should have all been exterminated within the first minute of the attack.  As it was we were doing very well--at our end of the ship, at all events; for although the savages quickly recovered themselves after the first moment of astonishment at finding nobody on the main-deck to oppose them, and began to pour in a hot fire of arrows, not one of our party--who were somewhat scattered, and were all lying down, most of them behind some sort of shelter--was hit.