CHAPTER XIX.
THEY FIGHT THE SERAPIS.
The battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis stands in history as the first signal collision on the sea between the Englishman and the American.

For obstinacy, mutual hatred, and courage, it is without precedent or subsequent in the story of ocean.

The strife long hung undetermined, but the English flag struck in the end.
There would seem to be something singularly indicatory I in this engagement.

It may involve at once a type, a parallel, and a prophecy.
Sharing the same blood with England, and yet her proved foe in two wars--not wholly inclined at bottom to forget an old grudge--intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.
Regarded in this indicatory light, the battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis--in itself so curious--may well enlist our interest.
Never was there a fight so snarled.

The intricacy of those incidents which defy the narrator's extrication, is not illy figured in that bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchors of the two ships, which confounded them for the time in one chaos of devastation.
Elsewhere than here the reader must go who seeks an elaborate version of the fight, or, indeed, much of any regular account of it whatever.