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Updated: June 5, 2025
Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the bridge, Sterne, the mate, tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room companion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about with indifference to the right and left at the river banks slipping astern of the Sofala steadily.
Just as we came under his quarter he pointed a gun that was sticking out a little abaft his main-shrouds right at us, and put the match to it, but it happened very luckily that the gun blew. A fellow that was standing on the quarter-deck then took up a blunderbuss and presented it, which by its not going off must have missed fire.
I was abaft the cabin on the port side when Dorothy called my name a sudden accent of terror in her voice. The alarm was sounded none too soon. Either fortune, or skill had served those demons well.
Taking refuge abaft, a tall old man, with bald forehead and gray moustache, had lashed himself to a stanchion, by winding a piece of rope round his body, whilst he clasped in his arms, and held fast to his breast, two girls of fifteen or sixteen, half enveloped in a pelisse of reindeer-skin.
The only person who really did not mind the motion at all was the wireless operator in his little cubby-bole abaft the chart-house. He, with a pair of telephone receivers clipped on over his ears ready to catch stray snatches of conversation from invisible ships and distant shore stations, sat enthroned in a chair bolted to the deck. His den was hermetically sealed to keep out the water.
"I thought," replied Philip, mournfully, "that I was sailing as captain of a vessel round the Cape; the sea was calm and the breeze light; I was abaft; the sun went down, and the stars were more than usually brilliant; the weather was warm, and I lay down on my cloak, with my face to the heavens, watching the gems twinkling in the sky and the occasionally falling meteors.
Before this another gang had been able to slip the other chain to position abaft the mizzenmast, hook on the tackle, and lead the fall through a snatch-block at the quarter-bitts forward to the midship capstan.
They had to rig up the compass abaft the wheel, and do some other things that you wouldn't understand, madam, such as running a spar out to stern to take sight by." "I declare," said Mrs. Cliff, "that sort of sailing must have astonished any ship that saw it. Did you meet any other vessels?" "Oh yes," said Burke.
The men had reached the main rigging and were in the very act of commencing operations when a huge sea swept unbroken under the schooner; and as the crest passed her and she settled slopingly down on the back of it, I heard the water in the hold come rushing aft, accompanied by a crashing sound below which told me that the cabin bulkhead had given way, and the next instant the water surged up through the sky-light-hole in the deck, showing that she was at that moment full to the beams abaft.
He buckled Joey into the garment, fastened his own oilskins, and rejoined the second officer on the bridge. A glance showed him the dark wall of the mainsail rising abaft the after funnel. The quarter-master at the wheel, having recovered his wits, was keeping the ship's nose up to the wind by a steady pressure to port. The gale was as fierce as ever.
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