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Updated: May 2, 2025
As he spoke, the football came skimming over the ice, towards the spot on which they stood, with about thirty of the men running at full speed and shouting like maniacs after it. "That's your sort, my hearties! another like that and it's home! Pitch into it, Mivins. You're the boy for me. Now, then, Grim, trip him up! Hallo, Buzzby, you bluff-bowed Dutchman, luff! luff! or I'll stave in your ribs!
It was indeed evident, even to the inexperienced eyes of Nigel, that the Marie Rose was closing in swiftly upon the stranger. She was a heavy, bluff-bowed, broad-sterned vessel which labored clumsily through the seas. The swift, fierce little Winchelsea boat swooping and hissing through the waters behind her was like some keen hawk whizzing down wind at the back of a flapping heavy-bodied duck.
Here, almost always, are the bluff-bowed hookers from the outer islands, seeking cargoes of flour and yellow Indian meal, bringing in exchange fish, dried or fresh, and sometimes turf for winter fuel.
The outlying villas closed up thicker and thicker, until their shoulders met, and we were driving between a double line of houses with garish shops at the corners, and such a stream of traffic as I had never seen, roaring down the centre. Then suddenly we were on a broad bridge with a dark coffee-brown river flowing sulkily beneath it, and bluff-bowed barges drifting down upon its bosom.
Very different was this smooth, gliding motion from the quick plunge and shock of the bluff-bowed fishing boat to which he was accustomed. The sails had been scrubbed until there was not a speck upon them. The masts were lofty and tapering, the rigging neat and trim, and every stay as taut as iron.
The cables were brought up, but it needed a very short examination only to show Stephen that they were old and worn from end to end. “It will go hard with us if we have to rely upon these,” he said. “They would not hold a bluff-bowed craft like this two minutes; the very first roller that struck her would snap them like pack-threads.
So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
"Paddy," he cried to the old man, who was fixing a hook on a fishing-line, "there's a ship!" It did not take Mr Button long to reach the hill-top, and there she was, beating up for the island. Bluff-bowed and squab, the figure of an old Dutch woman, and telling of her trade a league off.
Next day the Saucy Sally shipped some shingle ballast, got under weigh on the first of the ebb tide, and safely threading her way past the shallows and through the narrow channels of the harbor, emerged into the open sea, and turned her bluff-bowed stem eastwards.
All were nameless when I saw them for the first time, and strange; but in the days that followed I learned them rope and spar. Vessels from almost every western nation were there, too bluff-bowed Dutch craft with square-headed crews, brigantines from the Levant, and ships from Spain, England, and America.
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