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Some of the workmen were hewing timber and putting up the ribs of the vessel; others were bolting planks to the ribs. The size of the ship amazed him; it was larger than his father's barn. In a few weeks the hull would be finished, the masts put in, the rigging rove, and then the ship would be launched.
Lawrence, Roanoke, and Minnesota, also enveloped in the clouds of battle that now and then reflected the crimson lightnings of the god of war. The masts of the Cumberland were protruding above the water. The Congress presented a terrible scene of carnage. The gunboats Beaufort and Raleigh were signaled to take off the wounded and fire the ship.
"I'm sure I hope so, too," I replied eagerly, thinking him an awfully jolly fellow, and very unlike the man I imagined him to be at first; and we then shook hands again to cement the compact of eternal friendship, although I took care this time that my demonstrative boatswain should not give me so forcible a squeeze with his huge fist as before, observing as I looked round the vessel and up at her towering masts overhead: "What a splendid ship!"
We crowded also as much canvass as our yards would spread, or our masts carry to have got clear; but finding the pirate gained upon us, and would certainly come up with us in a few hours, we prepared to fight; our ship having twelve guns, and the rover eighteen.
She had lost her mizzenmast, and her other masts and several of her yards were injured. Her sails and rigging were cut to pieces. So numerous were the shot-holes in her hull, that the carpenter and his mates were unable to stop them until she had three and a half feet of water in her hold.
But here is something new and strange indeed for this region; along one of the ledges of rock, fitted as it were into a cradle, lies the great steamship "Golden Rule," a vessel full two hundred and fifty feet long, and holding six or seven hundred people. Her masts are gone, and so are the tall chimneys from which the smoke of her engine used to rise like a cloud.
I could follow the line of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue when she was some feet under. A number of whirlpools spun round over her, but the slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradual descent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hull by their rigging, and which she dragged down with her.
“There is a clump of green trees,” he said, “some ten miles off. The schooner is nearing them, and I think, though of this I am not certain, that I can make out the masts of another craft lying there.” “Well, it is something to have located her,” the captain said. “Now we must find how we can best get there; that will be a work of time. We may as well begin by examining some of these channels.”
Did you ever see the ocean after a storm? Do you know what a "ground-swell" is? when the sea is heaving up in great smooth ridges without crest or foam, and deep troughs between when the tempest has ceased to howl and the winds to blow, yet still so uneven remains the surface of the mighty deep, still so dangerous are these smooth waves, that ships rock and tumble about, and sometimes lose their masts, or are flung upon their beam ends!
His voice was hushed, the boat was off, was lost; then once again we saw her; we felt the gale rushing; when we could see again, there were a few struggling in the waves, a few climbing back upon the sinking masts of the vessel, with wild signals. The little Basin boats were old and frail; only Gurdon had lately been building a new fishing-boat.
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