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Davis is contemptuous about her low freeboard forward; says he would rather go to sea in the Dulce. Just going to bed; a bitterly cold night. '17th Oct. Glass falling heavily this morning, to our great disgust. Wind back in the SW and much warmer. Starting at 5.30 we tacked on the tide over the "water-shed" behind Spiekeroog.
A plank was put on its edge all around, making a low freeboard to hold our provisions and to serve as a protection against bullets in case the pirates should fire upon us while running ashore. Life-lines were fastened to the sides, so we could take to the water in an emergency, and, with our bodies partially submerged, use our pistols to good advantage and offer poor targets.
Although the ram was the prime weapon of the ship, it often became so badly wrenched in collision as to start the whole forward part of the vessel leaking. The rowers were seated on benches fitted into a rectangular structure inside the hull. These benches were so compactly adjusted that the naval architects allowed only two feet of freeboard for every bank of oars.
Jeremy jumped forward with his blanket in time to stamp out a blaze where the firing-match had been dropped, and with the help of one of the pirates dragged the wounded man to his berth. Almost every shot of the last volley had done damage aboard the brig. Her freeboard, twice as high as that of the sloop, had offered a target which for expert gunners was hard to miss.
The bireme and the trireme were adopted by the Greeks, apparently without alteration, save that at Salamis the Greek galleys were said to have been more strongly built and to have presented a lower freeboard than those of the Phnicians.
The Princess Royal and the Kineo convoyed her past the upper battery, but from this point she had to trust to her speed and her low freeboard. In rounding Fifty-five Mile Point she was struck five times, one conical shell and one shrapnel penetrating her side above the water-line and bursting inboard.
One-third of her depth consisted of a sinking-chamber, protected by twelve-inch armour, and this chamber could be filled in a few minutes with four thousand tons of water. This is of course the same thing as saying she had two waterlines. The normal cruising line gave her a freeboard of ten feet. Above the sinking-tanks her vitals were protected by ten-inch armour.
The next instant the Porpoise was riding the waves of the little bay, dancing about as lightly as a cork, though, from the nature of her construction, she was quite low in the water, only about three feet of freeboard showing where the platform was located. "Well, she floats, anyhow," remarked the professor. "Row out and fasten cables fore and aft," he went on, turning to the two machinists.
Watch the deck crawl till sometimes the deck-plates buckle up into V-shaped ridges! See them with the seas sloshing up their low freeboard and over their narrow decks, so that men have to make use of a sort of trolley line to get about. A man is aft and has to go forward, say.
When said comforts of home were laden into the canoe, there remained forward and aft just about one square foot of space for Billy and me, and not over two inches of freeboard for the River. We could not stand up and pole; tracking with a tow-line was out of the question, because there existed no banks on which to walk; the current was too swift for paddling. So we knelt and poled.
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