about three o'clock in the
morning
We gave the boats a cheer as they pulled away , and watched them until they vanished in the shadowy obscurity inshore ; after which , as we expected to see nothing more of them until daylight , the watch was piped down , and going below I turned in . The night , however , was intensely hot , and the atmosphere of the midshipmen 's berth intolerably stuffy . I therefore slept but poorly , and was up and down , at intervals of about an hour , all through the night , listening for the sound of firing , and hoping that perchance the reflection of gun-flashes on the clouds might indicate that the boats had found their quarry . Once or twice , about three o'clock in the morning , some of us who , like myself , were on the qui vive , thought we caught the muffled sound of distant firing coming off to us on the damp night breeze , but the everlasting thunder of the surf on the sand a mile away was so loud that we might easily have been deceived . That something important , however , was happening ashore was evident , for about this time we saw the reflection of a brilliant glare in the sky which lasted nearly an hour , and then gradually died down . At seven o'clock the next morning all our doubts were set at rest by the appearance of two craft -- a slashing brig and a very smart-looking little schooner -- coming out over the bar with the _ Shark 's _ boats in tow ; and ten minutes later they rounded-to and anchored close to us . We now had an opportunity to take a good look at our prizes , and it needed no second glance to assure us that both were perfectly superb examples of the shipbuilder 's art .