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This greatly facilitated our new boat-builders' labours in the way of skill, besides having done so much of the actual toil to their hands. As soon as the keel was laid, Mark set up the frame, which came together with very little trouble. The wailes were then got out, and were fitted, each piece being bolted in its allotted place.
However, thanks to a clean keel and fair winds, they made a smashing passage and their sufferings were not unduly prolonged. Immediately on his arrival at Antofagasta the young skipper reported by cable to his owners, thereby eliciting the following reply from Cappy Ricks: "You stole ship. If you value your ticket bring her back with cargo agent provides."
"Rocks under her bottom," thought the crew of seven hands, as they leaped on deck, and felt the out-lying reefs of the Eddystone playing pitch and toss with their keel.
The prow of the boat is connected with the apex of the parabola by a curve whose concavity is directed upward. The vessel is 20.25 m. in length at the water line, has an everywhere equal width of 3.9 m., and a length of 16 m. from the stern to the apex of the parabola of the keel. The bottom of the boat is nearly absolutely flat.
The sky was clearing to the eastward, the light giving a droll shape to the bushes, and showing a little mist hanging low when the keel grated on the gravel, and there on the shore-head was a man standing, a sea-coat, as I think they name it, round him.
He worked at the forge, in the rope-walks, at the sawing mills, and in the manufactures for wire drawing, making paper and extracting oil. While at Zaandam, Peter finished a sixty gun ship, upon which he had worked diligently from the laying of the keel. As the Russians then had no harbor in the Baltic, this ship was sent to Archangel, on the shores of the White Sea.
The azure water had a perfect setting of evergreens, in which all the shades of the fir, the balsam, the pine, and the spruce were perfectly blended; and at intervals on the shore in the emerald rim blazed the ruby of the cardinal flower. It was at once evident that the unruffled waters had never been vexed by the keel of a boat.
And now the skipper took his post upon the bowsprit and gave his orders by word or sign to the men who governed the movement of the great square of canvas by means of the lines attached to the corners, the two at the fore corners of the sail getting outside the bulwarks, barefooted, to walk along the streak, and hauling just as much as was necessary to drag the sail right beneath the keel, their two messmates preparing to follow, and under the captain's guidance keeping all square and exact in the effort to get the keel to act as the dividing line to mark the oblong into two exact portions.
It could only be compared to strings of diamonds, rubies and pearls. With a fairy's witchery, or a magician's spell, the whole face of the waters was changed. Each wrecked craft along the shore, partially buried in sand, masts gone, keel broken, and anchor dragged, with the surf breaking over all, was transformed under the brilliant sunshine, until no painting could be more artistically beautiful.
The theory which would lop off the strongest forces from life, and bend it before the passions of the multitude, would result in suppressing the advance-guard, and leaving the army without leaders.... When the boat leans over, must I not throw my weight on the other side to keep an even keel? Or must we all sit down to leeward?
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