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Ships and steamers, with black sides and flaunting colours, are moored everywhere, showing their flags, Russian and English, Austrian, American, and Greek; and along the quays country ships from the Black Sea or the islands, with high carved poops and bows, such as you see in the pictures of the shipping of the seventeenth century.
He knew how the southern end of Manhattan looked when Hendrick Hudson moored the Half Moon in the lower harbor; and where the shore line lay when the old Dutch keels with their high poops and proud pennons rode at anchor in the river; and again later on when the English flag had replaced the Dutch, and the towering masts of frigates and brigs and schooners made with their threaded rigging a constant etching of the water front.
Upon their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek; the iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red; the companions are portals to smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of no roaming and remembering the tumbling waters and the far-off harbours that must ever be more alluring than the harbours where we be.
These two antiquated vessels were lying side by side and close together, with their tall poops reaching far up toward the surface of the sea; and right on top of them, resting partly on one ship and partly on the other, was our brig, just as firmly fixed as if she had been on the stocks in a shipyard! "The whole thing was so wonderful that it nearly took away my breath.
See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee, like boats of hide, and of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current, like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together.
The officers, and perhaps the crew, slept under the poop and forecastle, and in other buildings on deck, as is the case on board many vessels at the present day, only the forecastles and poops were more like those of a Chinese junk than of any modern European craft.
The splendid day is good enough for <i>them</i>; what is best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among clustered <i>pali</i> and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the general effect of a great entrance.
We passed among myriads of Japanese junks, gliding softly, wafted by imperceptible breezes on the smooth water; their motion could hardly be heard, and their white sails, stretched out on yards, fell languidly in a thousand horizontal folds like window-blinds, their strangely contorted poops, rising up castle- like in the air, reminding one of the towering ships of the Middle Ages.
By that time, the poops of the Plantagenet and Cæsar became visible from one to the other, the smoke now driving principally off from the vessels. There again were our two admirals each anxiously watching to get a glimpse of his friend. The instant the place was clear, Sir Gervaise applied the trumpet to his mouth, and called out
The passengers of whom the Southern Cross carried twenty in her saloon were mustered, in their fine-weather toggery, on the poops of the two ships, eyeing each other curiously at intervals, but chiefly intent upon the impending ceremony of "speaking," the two captains having established themselves in their respective mizen-rigging.
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