in a naval engagement, is 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 is chiefly practised by privateers, which, bearing down on the enemy's quarter or broadside, drop from the bowprit, 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.