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For this circumstance Jim thanked his lucky stars, for there was the less likelihood of any men being on watch; while the noise they were making would prevent them from hearing, as a careful listener might have done, the throbbing of the Janequeo's engines and the churning of her propeller.
So we debated it for an hour, and then set about the more important work of salvaging the stranded derelict. Fortunately she went ashore near the last of the ebb, and now lay comfortably in the mud, apparently little damaged except for some long scratches on her side, and a broken blade in her propeller.
While I was cooking my supper, the little propeller Cygnet, which runs between Norfolk and Van Slyck's Landing, at Currituck Narrows, touched at Pungo Ferry, and put off an old woman who had been on a two years' visit to her relatives. She kindly accosted the dwarfed black with, "Charles, have you got a match for my pipe?" "Yes, missus," civilly responded the negro, handing her a light.
The propeller being mounted directly on the shaft, without the intervention of a clutch, makes it necessary, while on the ground, for the propeller to be started by some one outside, while others hold the machine until it attains the proper speed.
They are covered by a thick skin, easily peeled off, and are full of juice and very large pips; they have a sweetish rather sickly taste, but one can imagine they must be a great boon to the poor Italians who can get a good refreshing drink for almost nothing. Once aboard we discover that something has gone wrong a propeller has dropped a blade and the ship will not start for some hours.
The bitterest thought of all was that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins who would never learn that they had massacred a boat before breakfast. So Harvey rang the bell. "Yes, they slow daown one turn o' their blame propeller," said Dan, applying himself to Manuel's conch, "fer to keep inside the law, an' that's consolin' when we're all at the bottom. Hark to her! She's a humper!"
We all did this, whatever our nation American, English, German, or Italian and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats.
There was an arrangement whereby the machine could be held in leash, as it were, by a rope, and when the necessary pressure developed from the propeller blades, the rope could be loosed from the aviator's seat. But that attachment was not in use at Kentfield then. The powerful motor hummed and throbbed, for a muffler was temporarily dispensed with on account of its weight.
But I anticipate that we shall do better than that; the resistance of water is considerably greater than that of air to the vessel's passage through it, I admit; but I anticipate that this will be more than counterbalanced by the greater power of the propeller in the denser fluid. We shall soon see."
That is not to say that the lifting screw must be totally ruled out so far as the construction of aircraft is concerned. Much is still empirical, so far as this branch of aeronautics is concerned, and consideration of the structural features of a propeller goes to show that the relations of essential weight and effective area do not altogether apply in practice as they stand in theory.
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