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Having located this, they started to clear the sand away from the whole length of the piece of timber, and, while doing so, found that there were two other poles or spars laid alongside it. After an hour's hard work the three spars were unearthed, and proved to be the three poles of a set of sheer-legs, which had evidently only quite recently been hidden.
A trickle of water was already creeping up towards her stern; the rudder would be wet again within an hour. From the vantage point of a huge pair of sheer-legs Barry reconnoitered. He saw the last muddy toiler crawl from beneath the keel and scramble ashore.
"She sartainly sucks hard, sir," said Blunt, straightening his broad back and taking out a huge plug of tobacco. "If that there mud sticks to th' ship like it stuck to this yer mudhook, then we'll need sheer-legs to raise her, Cap'n."
But here we are at last, I think; this is the place where the sentry said we should find Wong-lih, isn't it?" "Ordnance Wharf, third shed along, first door on the far side of the sheer-legs before you come to the fifty-ton crane, he said," replied Drake; "so I reckon that this is the door.
"You have dug out of the sand what you think is a set of sheer-legs, eh, boy?" said the captain, raising himself in his berth on one elbow. "And have you found anything beside?" "No, sir," said Roger in reply, "there was nothing else dug up when I left; but I told the men to probe the sand, whilst I came off to you, to see if there was anything else there."
But all the gear sheer-legs, tackles, and the rest of it that had been of such immense value to Dick in getting the various matters out of the brig, had been destroyed with her; and if any very serious amount of turning over of the cargo under water should prove to be necessary, he would be obliged to provide and rig up a complete fresh set of apparatus.
The gun, which was the largest in the world at that time, was lowered into the "Europa" by the largest pair of "sheer-legs" in existence, and was lifted out again at Spezzia by the largest hydraulic crane of that day, and all these were the work of the Elswick firm.
His son, they said, was squeezing oil out of cocoa-nuts for a living on some God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean; but it was from that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with its three graving basins carved out of solid rock, its wharves, its jetties, its electric-light plant, its steam-power houses with its gigantic sheer-legs, fit to lift the heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and whose head could be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as you approached the New Harbor from the west.
A careful examination of the whole of the visible cargo failed to reveal the whereabouts of the water tanks, or of anything else that would serve the purpose of a boiler; and at length they were reluctantly driven to the conclusion that before the search could be further prosecuted it would be necessary to procure and rig up another set of sheer-legs, and to replace the lost gear with such blocks, etcetera, as they could find among the heterogeneous collection of stuff already salved from the brig.
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