Kent, the second mate, was shot through the heart while Mr. Cortlandt was defending his vessel from a French sloop of three six-pound guns. Subsequently, the mast of the French ship gone, its hull riddled, its deck a tangled mass of wreckage, it was boarded, and the four seamen remaining alive cut down. Still defending his vessel, Mr. Cortlandt had the Frenchman ransacked, and then put to the torch. His loss was a second mate; two of his seamen were wounded slightly, one of them John Preswick, who, cutlass in hand, had run out along the bowsprit, hung from the jib boom, and, as it crossed the low deck of the Frenchman, leaped down in the face of a pistol (already discharged) and three muskets (already discharged), and drove the edge of his blade through one of the Frenchman’s collar-bones. The following day, Mr. Brooker was promoted into the position of second mate, and the crew was searched for a third officer. It was not with a great deal of surprise that the twenty-nine men saw Captain Cortlandt choose John Preswick, who, in term of service, was out-ranked by twenty-two of them.
