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We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the boat's nose against the end of a jutting wharf. We were blind with fatigue. My men dropped the oars and fell off the thwarts as if dead. I made fast to a pile. A current rippled softly.
Three days later we were lying in Singapore harbour, and I had one or two runs ashore to have a good look at the town, with its busy port full of all kinds of vessels, from the huge black-sided steamer and trim East Indiaman, to the clumsy high-sterned, mat-sailed, Chinese junk, and long narrow Malay prahu.
There were timber-ships, huge and square-sided, unmistakeably from Quebec or Miramichi green high-sterned Dutch galliots American ships with long black hulls and tall raking masts and those far-famed "Black Ball" clippers, the Marco Polo and the Champion of the Seas, in short, the ships of all nations, with their marked and distinguishing peculiarities.
This did not damage the low flat ships of the Greeks, but it caught the high-sterned Persian ships, over-weighted as they were with lofty decks, and presented their broadsides to the Greeks, who eagerly attacked them, watching Themistokles because he was their best example, and also because Ariamenes, Xerxes's admiral, and the bravest and best of the king's brothers, attacked him in a huge ship, from which, as if from a castle, he poured darts and arrows upon him.
He had still some distance to pull, though he kept a look-out for a larger boat or a sailing hooker on her way up to Waterford. At length a little high-sterned craft was seen standing out of one of the many small bays which indent the western shore of the harbour. The captain stood up, and shouted and waved, and the hooker, hauling her wind, hove to to await their coming.
This one exceeded all my expectations; and besides, it was the coast of Asia, the mysterious continent which has been my dream from childhood bare, lofty, rocky, basaltic; islands of naked rock separated by narrow channels, majestic, perpendicular cliffs, a desolate uninhabited region, lashed by a heavy sea, with visions of swirling mists, shrieking sea-birds, and Chinese high-sterned fishing-boats with treble-reefed, three-cornered brown sails, appearing on the tops of surges, at once to vanish.
There was that prau lying so still swathed in her shroud of sewn palm-leaves she too had her indispensable man. They lived through each other, this Malay he had never seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed to be resting after a long journey.
The sudden impact of the bellam, uncomfortable as it was for all concerned, succeeded where they had failed, in getting them off the mud. An old-world touch is given to the waters of Basra by the high-sterned dhows anchored in the river. Above Ashar Creek the scenery of the banks with its wharves and big steamers is not particularly characteristic of the East.
Thus we can trace our lineage back to old Vernon Stone, who commanded a high-sterned, peak-nosed, fifty-gun ship against the Dutch. Through Hawke Stone and Benbow Stone we came down to my father, Anson Stone, who in his turn christened me Rodney, at the parish church of St. Thomas at Portsmouth in the year of grace 1786.
It is a high-prowed, high-sterned vessel, built on Viking lines, from a picture the observant must conclude, by a landsman carpenter. It swings across the river on a wire rope, with a running tackle, by the force of the stream and the aid of a large rudder. The man looked cautiously into the vine-clad shed. It was empty. He crept towards the boat and found no one there.
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