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He again returned to the steering-oar; and, hastily detaching it from the hook upon which it had been mounted as a rudder, he commenced using it as a paddle, and endeavoured to propel the raft against the wind. It is scarce necessary to say that he employed all his strength in the effort; but, notwithstanding this, he soon became convinced that he was employing it in vain.
He took its words literally on all occasions, and the Old Testament history had a wonderful charm for him. He would have been ready to hew any modern Agag in pieces before the Lord. He finally found his way to the Insane Asylum. The reader has already seen how abnormal was his mind, and will not be surprised that his storm-tossed soul lost its rudder at last.
It was some fifty-five kilometers back to Vitry, but with a good tail wind he made it in quick time. The French major in command of the squadron stationed there was exceedingly gracious. Yes, the American had landed, he told McGee, but he had taken off again within the hour. The trouble? Well, he complained that his rudder was jamming, but the mechanics could not find anything wrong.
I was satisfy'd with my chain, and, as on my death-bed, did now contentedly expect the coming hour. In the mean time the tempest, acting the decrees of Fate, had rent all the rigging from the vessel; no mast, no rudder left, not a rope or plank, but an awkward shapeless body of a ship tost up and down the flood.
"We'll do better," declared Tom. He had already set the gas machine in operation, and was now looking over the electric apparatus, to see that it was working well. It needed some adjustments, which he made. All this while the WHIZZER was moving about in a big circle, for the rudder had been automatically set to so swing the craft.
The deck was bare, without a sign of spar or sail, and when, with Cheditafa's help, he had forced the entrance of the little companionway, and had gone below, he found that the vessel had been entirely stripped of everything that could be carried away, and when he went on deck again he saw that even the rudder had been unshipped and removed.
The Pinta was the vessel whose owners repented having sold her. No wonder then that Columbus suspected the rascals of having bribed the crew to tamper with the rudder, in the hope of forcing their ship to put back into Palos. But he would not put back, he declared. Martin Pinzon was commanding the Pinta, and Martin knew what to do with perverse rudders and perverse men.
The Bishop's cheek paled a little. "Take your own time," he said, but his heart sank. He saw a little boat with torn sail and broken rudder, drifting on to a lee shore. "I seem to have been living at a great strain for the last year," said Hester. "I don't know one word from another now, but I think I mean concentration. That means holding your mind to one place, doesn't it?
Fathers played with their children in the street: one winter morning, when, after a heavy fall of snow and a subsequent frost, the ground was as slippery as glass, I watched a white-haired shopkeeper, lying prone on a home-made toboggan, with his feet sprawling behind for rudder, steer a load of merry youngsters full tilt down a steep lane behind his house.
How they battled by Manomet Point in the half gale and high sea, the night already upon them and the harbor unknown to any aboard, their rudder gone and their mast "broken in three places," we know from Bradford's graphic description. On Saturday they rested on their island and dried their clothes and their gunpowder. On Sunday they prayed and otherwise kept the Sabbath as was their want.
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