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The captain having ordered the quarter-boat to be lowered, we both, thinking it was going ashore, sprang down into the forecastle, filled our jacket pockets with tobacco to barter with the people ashore, and, when the officer called for ``four hands in the boat, nearly broke our necks in our haste to be first over the side, and had the pleasure of pulling ahead of the brig with a tow-line for half an hour, and coming on board again to be laughed at by the crew, who had seen our manoeuvre.
An' I'm supposed to give the longitude every noon. Why, dammit, boys, they'll claim they rescued us, an' like as not the English courts'll allow them salvage on our little tub." "Let go the tow-line! Let 'em go to h l!" they shouted angrily, and some started forward, but were stopped by the cook.
The Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly cliff. Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the face of a rock wall, when he slipped.
I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again.
His crew sullenly tailed on to the halyards, and the strange, outlandish sail, lateen in rig and dyed a warm brown, rose in the air. We were sailing on the wind, and when Yellow Handkerchief flattened down the sheet the junk forged ahead and the tow-line went slack. Fast as the Reindeer could sail, the junk outsailed her; and to avoid running her down I hauled a little closer on the wind.
"Haul in the gang-plank;" "Let go the tow-line," shouted the captain of the 'Fletcher'. Then he signalled the engineer to go ahead, and the little schooner 'Eothen' was abandoned to her own resources and the mercy of the mighty ocean.
Coming back from the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the names of all present. It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic. It took eight to return to Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking the canoes by a tow-line. The beaver meadows along the shore impeded the march.
I say there MAY be such tow-lines; I sincerely hope there are. But I have not met with them. This tow-line I had taken in myself just before we had got to the lock. I would not let Harris touch it, because he is careless. I had looped it round slowly and cautiously, and tied it up in the middle, and folded it in two, and laid it down gently at the bottom of the boat.
I emptied a large waterproof portmanteau, and tied it together with ropes, so as to form a life-buoy for my wife and Richarn, neither of whom could swim; the maps, journals, and observations, I packed in an iron box, which I fastened with a tow-line to the portmanteau. It appeared that we were to wind up the expedition with shipwreck, and thus lose my entire collection of hunting spoils.
The steamer, going slowly, and steering with a bridle from the tow-line to each quarter, kept the ship's canvas full until her crew had steadied the yards and furled it. They would then have rigged preventer-stays and shrouds on their shaky spars, had there been time; but there was not.
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