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There were lively times on board when the Minota rolled one bilge down and then the other, a score of men leaping for life and legs as the trade-boxes, booms, and eighty-pound pigs of iron ballast rushed across from rail to rail and back again. The poor pretty harbour yacht! Her decks and running rigging were a raffle. Down below everything was disrupted.
But when a livid blue light, lit in the swinging top, showed a number of black objects clinging to bulwarks and rigging, and the sea, with languid, heavy cruelty, pushing rather than beating them away, one by one, she knew that Death was there.
Then he sat down on the stock of an old anchor, to begin picking at the red rust scales as he too stared at the ships moored here and there. The tall masts and rigging had a certain fascination for Don, and each vessel seemed to offer a way out of his difficulties.
Fortunately her mainmast had gone by the board; had it been still standing, and had become locked in our rigging, we should have been in great peril ourselves. The remaining five men and a dog gained the ship, and the junk again went astern, and in three minutes afterwards went to the bottom. When they saw her sink, the Chinese raised up a cry at their miraculous escape.
Nobody knew what to do with the disaster except "the bow-oar," who is described as a gigantic youth "with his trousers rolled up some five feet," who was wading about the boat and rigging up some undescribed contrivance by which the cargo was unloaded, the boat tilted and the water let out by boring a hole through the bottom, and everything brought safely to moorings below the dam.
He used to make for me tiny little three-masted ships, about six inches long, with all the rigging complete; they were named after the famous American clippers of the day, and he painted microscopic American flags to hoist over the taff-rail. He tried to teach me how to paint in water-colors, but I responded better to his eloquence regarding the future of our country.
I woke at daylight next morning; to find the Kaspia at anchor, pitching, rolling, and tugging at her moorings as if at any moment the cable might part. Every now and again a sea would crash upon the deck, and the wind, howling through the rigging, sounded like the yelling of a thousand fiends. Hurrying on deck, I learn the worst. A terrific sea is running, and the glass falling every hour.
A musquet discharged in the air had no effect; but a four-pound shot over their heads sent them off in the utmost confusion. Many quitted their canoes and swam on shore; those in the great cabin leaped out of the windows; and those who were on the deck, and on different parts of the rigging, all leaped overboard.
He will be doing us mischief, I am afraid." "Let him get a little nearer though, and we will give him two to one," returned the colonel. Scarcely had he spoken, when another shot came, which cut away the topmast starboard shrouds. Hands were immediately sent aloft to secure the rigging, but this again delayed the progress of the work on the foremast.
Accordingly, the head of the Brunswick was put to the northward for the purpose of making the best of her way into port, while all possible sail was made on her. Sad was her state. Her mizen-mast was gone, and her two other masts and bowsprit were desperately wounded; her yards were shattered; all her running and most of her standing rigging was shot away, and her sails were in shreds and tatters.
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