United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The day wore on; there was not a sign of their gallant Captain and his brave followers, and at length it became too certain that they must have been taken prisoners by the French. A strong breeze now sprang up. After waiting off the port all the night, the Diamond ran across the Channel, and anchored at Spithead, with the intelligence of Sir Sydney Smith's capture.
"Oh, this is truly delightful," he exclaimed, after they had been skimming along for some time, enjoying the view of Spithead, where several large ships were at anchor; of Ryde, climbing up its steep hill; of Cowes, to the westward, and the wooded shores of the Solent extending in the same direction as far as the eye could reach.
For, as the day wore on, reports reached the Dockyard from the different coastguard-stations along the eastern and western coast of the mainland and from the Isle of Wight, whence a strict look-out had been kept on the approaches to Spithead and the adjacent waters of the Channel. These reports were all to the same effect.
"Well, it was on the twenty-ninth of August, '82, that's just fourteen years and about six weeks ago, that we were lying at Spithead, in company with Lord Howe's fleet of between twenty and thirty sail of the line: there was the Victory, Barfleur, Ocean, and Union, all three-deckers, I recollect, close to us.
"I don't half like it," said Adams, when he was sufficiently awake to understand the message of his mate. "It's all very true what you say, Williams; the ship has been little better than a hell since we left Spithead, and Captain Bligh don't deserve much mercy, but mutiny is wrong any way you look at it, and I've got my doubts whether any circumstances can make it right."
Rolling and labouring, heeling over gunwales under sometimes, the Martin managed to reach Spithead in the teeth of a stormy south- easter, which was sending the surf over Southsea Castle as the big rollers coming in from the offing broke against the pile-protected rampart below; and, we were just going to anchor in our usual berth under the lee of the Spit, `Gyp' standing as well as he could with his rickety sea-legs by the taffrail.
And so he was taken off in a boat one evening to his ship, lying at Spithead, ready to sail. And so the first thing he made out in her as he got near her, was the figure-head of the old Seventy-four, where he had seen the Devil.
Drafted into the ships in thousands, they checked in a measure the surface symptoms of disaffection, but left the disease itself untouched. But a greater calamity than this was in store for them. In the wholesale mutinies at Spithead and the Nore the blow fell with appalling suddenness, notwithstanding the fact that in one form or another it had been long foreseen.
The wind suddenly dropped, just as the tide turned, the ebb setting out from Spithead towards the east, dead against them; when, instead of running in homewards "in no time," the cutter, after a time, became becalmed first, and then gradually began to drift out into the open Channel again. Dick was the first to notice this. "Look, Master Bob!" he cried. "We aren't making no headway at all!
"That's very strange," he observed; "I think, Peter Trawl, that we have met before, when you were a very little chap. Do you remember your father taking off the doctor and the mate of a ship lying at Spithead, when you and your brother Jack were in the boat, and he was to be put on board the brig?"
Word Of The Day