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These, like the war-boats, are made from a single stem. The larger ones are made in just the same way as the war-boats. In the smaller ones the bow is shaped from the solid block and is not opened out, as is the rest of the boat.
Magniac invented his rudder to help war-boats ram each other; and war went out of fashion and Magniac he went out of his mind because he said he couldn't serve his country any more. I wonder if any of us ever know what we're really doing." "If you want to see the coach locked you'd better go aboard. It's due now," says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships.
Brown expected an attack to be delivered as soon as the tide had flowed enough again to enable the war-boats which had cut off his retreat to enter the creek. At any rate he was sure there would be an attempt to carry off his long-boat, which lay below the hill, a dark high lump on the feeble sheen of a wet mud-flat. But no move of any sort was made by the boats in the river.
The Malay fleet consisted of a large number of long war-boats or prahus, each about ninety feet long or more, and carrying a brass gun in the bows, the pirates being armed with swords, spears and muskets. Each boat was paddled by from sixty to eighty men.
The passage of the straits between the Peninsula and Sumatra, and between Sumatra and Borneo, are the parts of this tribal migration that are the most difficult to imagine. But we know that Kayans do not fear to put out to sea in their long war-boats.
The war-boats, in spite of their gay flags, and the row their crews kicked up to frighten us barbarians, were speedily sunk or sent to the right-about; while the batteries on shore, having soon had enough of it, ceased firing. In a short time we saw our steamer, the Hermes, come puffing up, with the huge Burmese war-vessel, which she had captured, in tow.
"We had heard, meantime, of a large Burmese war-vessel, of which one of our steamers was sent in search, while the company's steamers proceeded up the river to meet a fleet of war-boats, pouring in a tremendous fire on the stockades on their way.
A man would bring the spear to a long Dyak village house, deliver his message, and return, leaving the spear to be carried on by one of the men in that house to the next village, and so on. At once the men in that house would get their war-boats ready. They would furbish up their arms, and sharpen their weapons, and decorate their helmets and war-jackets.
"Never," says a celebrated historian, "was the Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the height of the mountains, the breadth of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy," or their elephants of war. One of the sovereigns of the country brought against him as many as 2,500 elephants; the borderers on the Indus resisted him with 4,000 war-boats.
The Dyak war-boat is a long built canoe, more substantially constructed than the prahu of the Malays, and sufficiently capacious to hold from seventy to eighty men. This also has a roof to fight from. They are generally painted, and the stern ornamented with feathers. Both descriptions of war-boats are remarkably swift, notwithstanding such apparent top-weight. To proceed:
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