in a naval engagement, a desperate and furious assault made by one ship on another, after having found every other method to reduce her ineffectual: it may be performed in different places of the ship, according to their circumstances and situation, by the assailant detaching a number of men armed with pistols and cutlasses on the decks of his antagonist, who stands in the same predicament with a city stormed by the besiegers. This expedient, however, is rarely attempted by king's ships, which generally decide the combat without grappling each other; but chiefly practised by privateers, which, bearing down on the enemy's quarter or broadside, drop from the bowsprit, which projects over the defendant's deck, an earthen shell, called a flint-pot, charged with fiery and suffocating combustibles, which immediately bursts, catches fire, and fills the deck with insufferable stench and smoke: in the middle of the confusion thus occasioned, the privateer's crew rush aboard, under cover of the smoke, and easily overpower the astonished enemy; unless they have close quarters to which they can retreat and beat them off the deck.