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"Pray, how did she appear to you?" "Why, the fact is, I did not see anything but the loom of her hull," replied the other. "It was very strange; the night was fine, and the heavens clear; we were under top-gallant sails, for I do not carry on during the night, or else we might have put the royals on her; she would have carried them with the breeze.
He then came upon deck, ordered all hands into the boats, and was the last to leave the ship, which he did by throwing himself into the sea, and swimming to the nearest boat! The ship was on her beam end, top-gallant yards under the water. They then pushed off some distance from the ship, expecting her to sink in a very short time.
We probably were as fine a sight, with our studding-sails spread far out beyond the ship on either side, and rising in a pyramid to royal studding-sails and sky-sails, burying the hull in canvas, and looking like what the whale-men on the Banks, under their stump top-gallant masts, call "a Cape Horn-er under a cloud of sail." Friday, August 12th.
At meridian, on the fourth day out, the captain got a good observation, and ascertained that the ship was in the latitude of Oporto, with an offing of less than a degree. At this time the top-gallant sails of the Foam might be discovered from the deck, resembling a boat clinging to the watery horizon.
My little frigate lowered her top-gallant sails out of respect, as other nations used to do, and ought now, and be damned to them, whenever they pass the flag of old England " "How do you mean?" inquired I. "I mean that she spread her white handkerchief, which fluttered in her hand as she went along, and knelt down upon it on one knee.
The ship had been hove to under a close-reefed main-topsail, with the top-gallant yards down, the sea running very high, and the ship pitching much. It was Sunday, and the captain was at dinner with the officers, when a bustle was heard on deck. He ran instantly to the poop, and saw two men in the water, amidst the wreck of a six-oared cutter.
A fellow who has learned to stand on the deck of a ship, rolling her guns in the water, and pitching bows under, and has had to furl top-gallant sails with a hurricane blowing in his teeth, can easily do anything of this sort, if he has the mind to do it. I am not like you, Ernest; you see I have been scorching under tropical suns, while you have had time to practise the art of skating."
It blew fresh from the eastward, and I instantly put the helm up, and shaped my course for the old rock. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; we ran slap before it, but soon found it necessary to take in the top-gallant sails. This we at last accomplished, one at a time. We then thought a reef or two in the topsails would be acceptable; but that was impossible.
I was stationed at the weather cross-jack braces; three other light hands at the lee; one boy at the spanker-sheet and guy; a man and a boy at the main topsail, top-gallant, and royal braces; and all the rest of the crew men and boys tallied on to the main brace.
A dozen men-of-war are gliding majestically out of port, their long buntings streaming from the top-gallant masts, calling on the skulking Frenchman to come forth from his bights and bays; and what looms upon us yonder from the fog-bank in the east? a gallant frigate towing behind her the long low hull of a crippled privateer, which but three short days ago had left Dieppe to skim the sea, and whose crew of ferocious hearts are now cursing their imprudence in an English hold.
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