Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
The albicore would make a frantic dash down the lagoon, hoping, perhaps, to find in the open sea a release from his foe. Then, half drowned with the pull of the scull, he would pause, dart from side to side in perplexity, and then make an equally frantic dash up the lagoon, to be checked in the same manner.
At this time we had an abundant stock of provisions. Each man had a quart of chocolate and three ounces of rusk for breakfast; and had fresh meat or fresh fish every day for dinner, having plenty of the latter about the ship, so that we could almost always make our choice between dolphin and albicore.
The sullen crocodile basking in the sun, sank noiselessly; a splash would be heard, and a four feet albicore would fling himself madly into the air, striving vainly to elude the ominous black triangle that cut the water like a knife close in his rear. Small chance for the poor fugitive, with the ravenous shark following silent and inexorable. We lay on our oars and watched the result.
This goddess was personified by an athletic, ugly man, marked with the small-pox, dressed as a female, with a woman's night-cap on his head, ornamented with sprigs of sea-weed; she had a harpoon in her hand, on which was fixed an albicore; and in her lap lay one of the boys of the ship, dressed as a baby, with long clothes and a cap: he held in his hand a marlinspike, which was suspended round his neck with a rope yarn: this was to assist him in cutting his teeth, as the children on shore use a coral.
He had escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in the same year, he and a few others only had survived. For thirty years he had kept the lagoon to himself, as a ferocious tiger keeps a jungle.
Neptune lowered his trident, and presented the dolphin to the captain, as Amphitrite did her albicore, in token of submission and homage to the representative of the King of Great Britain. "I have come," said the god, "to welcome you into my dominions, and to present my wife and child." The captain bowed. "Allow me to ask after my brother and liege sovereign, the good old King George."
Then you would see the superb albicore, with his glittering sides, sailing aloft, and often describing an arc in his descent, disappear on the surface of the water. Far off, the lofty jet of the whale might be seen, and nearer at hand the prowling shark, that villainous footpad of the seas, would come skulking along, and, at a wary distance, regard us with his evil eye.
Shoals of albicore were darting across the bows of the different ships; and the seamen perched upon the cat-heads and spritsail-yard, had succeeded in piercing with their harpoons many, which were immediately cut up, and in the frying-pans for breakfast.
It was a tiny possession, but it was home; and so little used to change was she that already a sort of home-sickness was upon her; but it passed away almost as soon as it came, and she fell to wondering at the things around her, and pointing them out to the child. When they came to the place where Dick had hooked the albicore, he hung on his oars and told her about it.
The weather was now beautifully fine, the breeze tempering the heat of the sun, and flying fish and albicore playing around the vessel as we neared the equator; while, occasionally, a school of whales would spout to windward, or a shoal of porpoises, having a game of high jinks as they leaped out of the water in their graceful curves one after the other, would cross our bows backwards and forwards in sport, apparently mocking our comparatively slow progress through the sea in contrast to their own rapid and graceful movements, and showing how easily they could outstrip us when they so pleased.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking