United States or Portugal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The consul shook his head. "Never saw or heard of any of them." We were sitting in full view of the roadstead where Anthony and Cleopatra's ships had moored a hundred times. The consul's garden sloped in front of us, and most of the flowers that Europe reckons rare were getting ready to bloom. "Would you know the man if you saw him again, Will?" I asked. "Sure I would!" "Then look!"
I had determined to anchor at Caldera, a small port on the south-west side of Mindanao, about ten miles distant from Zamboanga, where the governor resides. The latter is a considerable place, but the anchorage in its roadstead is said to be bad, and the currents that run through the Straits of Basilan are represented to be strong.
As we approached the little harbour we passed through a large fleet of traders, brought up in the roadstead for shelter, most of which, belonging to London merchants, dared not therefore put into any port held by the Cavaliers. Three or four had dropped their anchors while we were out fishing. We hailed one of them, which had come in from the westward, to ask the news. "Bad news!" was the answer.
The Russians, twenty-six ships strong, inclusive of eleven destroyers, having cleared the roadstead, steamed slowly to the eastward, and were, that same day, sighted in the offing from Wei-hai-wei, apparently practising evolutions. But on the following day they all returned to Port Arthur, and anchored in the roadstead, under the guns of the batteries.
As before intimated, the Tamil women are far handsomer in features than the Singhalese race. The Jaffna peninsula has been peopled by the Tamil race for two thousand years or more. Point Pedro is a small town, and the harbor does not deserve the name, being only an open roadstead sheltered by a coral reef, where a number of vessels of moderate size are nearly always to be seen.
The large consumption of coal in proportion to the ground covered made a renewal necessary, and we went into Ciará, an open roadstead sheltered only by submerged coral reefs, on the northeast coast of Brazil.
But we had to change our purpose about San Miguel, for a storm came up about noon that so tossed and pitched the vessel that common sense dictated a run for shelter. We anchored in the open roadstead of Horta, half a mile from the shore. The town has eight thousand to ten thousand inhabitants.
You feel that they are dishonestly locked up, to be hunted about from wharf to wharf on a dark, greasy, square pool of black water as a brutal reward at the end of a faithful voyage. A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargo-lighters alongside and her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is accomplishing in freedom a function of her life.
It commanded the entire roadstead, from a point three miles east of the harbour's mouth, right round to the south and west as far as the Pinnacle Rock; and the difficulty was how to avoid being picked up by it before we had delivered our attack. But by this time I knew the seaward surroundings of Port Arthur almost by heart.
Though the waves were running high, even in the sheltered harbour, they scarcely rocked the massive vessel. An experienced pilot must have steered it past the shallows and cliffs on the eastern side of the roadstead, for instead of passing around the island of Antirrhodus as usual, it kept between the island and the Lochias, steering straight towards the entrance into the little royal harbour.
Word Of The Day