Kenway - Ship Explosion

I raised my cutlass, determined not to go easily into the great unknown. And then from the stern – in fact, from the magazine, where our men had obviously failed to douse the fire whose fingers had found the stores of gunpowder – came a great explosion.
In a thunderclap I was blasted off the deck, describing a circle in the air and finding a moment of perfect peace, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, whether I still had all of my limbs and in that moment not caring anyway. Not knowing where I’d come to rest: whether I’d slam to the deck of a ship and break my back or land impaled on a snapped mast or be tossed into the eye of the magazine inferno.
Or what I did, which was slap into the sea.
Maybe alive, maybe dead, maybe conscious, maybe not. Either way I seemed to drift not far below the surface, watching the sea above: a shifting mottle of blacks, greys and the flaming orange of burning ships. Past me sank dead bodies, eyes wide open as though surprised in death. They discoloured the water in which they sank and trailed guts and stringy sinew like tentacles. I saw a smashed mizzen mast twirling in the water, bodies snared in rigging dragged to the depths.
I thought of Caroline. Of my father. Then of my adventures on the Emperor. I thought about Nassau, where there was only one law: pirate law. And, of course, I thought about how I had been mentored from privateer to pirate by Edward – Edward
Thatch.
Chapter 23
All of this I thought as I sank, eyes open, aware of everything happening around me: the bodies, the wreckage … Aware of it, yet uncaring. As though it was happening to somebody else. Looking back, I know it for what it was, that brief moment – and it was brief – as I sank in the water. I had, in those moments, lost the will to live.
After all, this expedition – Edward had warned against it. He’d told me not to go. ‘That Captain Bramah’s bad news,’ he’d said. ‘You mark my words.’
And he was right. And I was going to pay for my greed and stupidity with my life.
And then I found it again. The will to go on. I found it. I grasped it. I shook it. I held it close to my bosom and from that moment to this I never let it go again. My legs kicked, my arms arrowed, and I streaked towards the surface, breaking the water and gasping – for air, and in shock at the carnage around me, watching as the last of the English frigate slipped below the water, still ablaze. All across the ocean were small blazes soon to be doused by the water, floating debris everywhere, and men, of course – survivors.
And then, just as I had feared, the sharks started to attack, and the screams began – screams of terror at first and then, as the sharks began to investigate more insistently, screams of agony that only intensified as more predators gathered and they began to feed. The screams I’d heard during the battle, agonized as they were, were nothing compared to the shrieks that tore that soot-filled afternoon apart.
I was one of the lucky ones, whose wounds were not enough to attract the sharks’ attention, and I swam for shore. At one point I was knocked by a shark gliding past, thankfully too concerned with joining the feeding frenzy to stop. My foot seemed to snag what felt like a fin in the water and I prayed that whatever blood I was leaking was not enough to tempt the shark away from the more plentiful chum elsewhere. It was a cruel irony that those more heavily wounded were the ones who were attacked first.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Chapter 22/23