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His copper-bottomed ships came up with and captured six of the enemy, five of which were English prizes. The sixth carried three hundred troops with military stores. Hughes had scored a point. Suffren of course followed in a general chase, and by three P.M. four of his best sailers were two or three miles from the sternmost English ships.
The wreck proved to be a beautiful copper-bottomed schooner, of about a hundred and eighty tons burthen. She had been dashed on shore with great violence, and thrown many yards above the high-water mark. Her masts and spars were lying in all directions on the beach, which was strewed with her cargo.
Blake continued his blockade in an open roadstead for six months, through autumn and winter, an unheard of thing in those days and exceedingly difficult. Blake was himself ill, his ships were not the copper-bottomed ones of a hundred years later, and there was not, as in later days, an English base at Gibraltar. But he never relaxed his vigilance.
Here's the real article, I said, and I don't like it; here's the real, first-rate, copper-bottomed aristocrat. 'AW' I DON'T KNOW YE, DO I? GOD DAMN YE, DID GOD MAKE YE? No, that couldn't be nothing but genuine; a man got to be born to that, and notice! smart as champagne and hard as nails; no kind of a fool; no, SIR! not a pound of him! Well, what's he here upon this beastly island for? I said.
Now that a real, copper-bottomed motive for this dislike had been supplied to him, he felt himself capable of dealing with a whole regiment of the breed.
At length Admiral Rodney, disgusted with the pusillanimity of the enemy, returned to his anchorage in Gros Islet Bay with most of the line-of-battle ships, leaving only a squadron of the faster sailing copper-bottomed ships and frigates to watch the enemy's motions, and to give him notice should they attempt to escape. The seamen little doubted that they would soon have a brush with the enemy.
Jack took it up, and his eye was caught by an advertisement for the sale of the Joan d'Arc, prize to H.M. ship Thetis, brigantine of 278 tons, copper-bottomed, armed en flute, with all her stores, spars, sails, running and standing rigging, then lying in the harbour of Portsmouth, to take place on the following Wednesday. Jack rang the bell, and ordered post-horses.
And the sickening part of the business is that this real, copper-bottomed burglary'll make them hunt about all over the shop for clues and things, and the odds are they'll find me out, even if they don't book the real man. Shouldn't wonder if they had a detective down for a big thing of this sort. 'They are having one, I heard. 'There you are, then, said Jim, dejectedly. 'I'm done, you see.
He was a good fellow, but he had no call to mix himself up in our troubles. Sparrows on the Housetops 'I've often regretted, said Blenkiron, 'that miracles have left off happening. He got no answer, for I was feeling the walls for something in the nature of a window. 'For I reckon, he went on, 'that it wants a good old-fashioned copper-bottomed miracle to get us out of this fix.
A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long defunct trade. "That was the school I was trained in," he said to me almost boastfully, lying back amongst his pillows with a rug over his legs.
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