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Updated: May 11, 2025
As for myself, I should have gone in that brig, in utter ignorance of the risks I ran, and believing myself to be about as guilty, in a moral sense, as I was when I smuggled tobacco, on the coast of Ireland, or opium in Canton. As the Topaz was coming out of the port of Havana, homeward bound, and just as she was abreast of the Moro, the brig carried away her bobstay.
Whilst meditating one morning in bed, I started up with a determination to have an interview with Sir J. Colpoys, who was one of the Lords of the Admiralty, and ask him in person for employment, for I began to be apprehensive if I remained longer on shore I should think a ship was something to eat, and the bobstay the top-sail haulyards.
There Vane replaced the broken bobstay with a solid piece of steel, and then sat down to write a letter while Carroll stretched his cramped limbs ashore. The letter was addressed to Evelyn, and he found it difficult to express himself as he desired.
Bottle-o'-Beer, Jack Frying-Pan, Tom Bobstay, Upside Down, and the like, were favorite names; and our fun-loving young sailing-master hints, in his letters of the time, that the archives of the fourth auditor's office at Washington may possibly embalm the names of certain Annapolis belles that had been borne by some of these sable folk!
Then, seeing that he was entirely surrounded by Spaniards, he left the spar and swam as well as he could to the bow of a great ship close beside him, and grasping a rope trailing from the bowsprit, managed by its aid to climb up until he reached the bobstay, across which he seated himself with his back to the stem.
I waited for the full day and then tried to push through. The little craft was tossing in the heavy swell, and before she had been in the pack for ten minutes she came down on a cake of ice and broke the bobstay. Then the water- inlet of the motor choked with ice.
The squall swooped down upon us with a weird, shrieking howl, and a dash of wet that was half rain and half spray; and the next moment, with a tremendous creaking and groaning of timbers and gear, with all three topsail-yards on the caps, and with the chain bobstay half-buried in the foam that heaped itself up about our bows, away went the frigate, like a startled sea-bird, speeding down-wind upon the wings of the squall, enveloped in a sheet of rain that was more than half salt water, with the lightning flickering and darting all round her, and the thunder crashing overhead in a continuous booming roar.
'You had some fun there, I suppose? I put in, thinking of well, of Ostend in August. 'Fun! A filthy hole I call it; we had to stop a couple of days, as we fouled a buoy coming in and carried away the bobstay; we lay in a dirty little tidal dock, and there was nothing to do on shore. 'Well, what next?
267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark. Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her crew struck dumb.
"It must be mine," he thought, "for am I not the first to see it on the beach?" Sure enough, there it was all high and dry and painted white. He trotted his horse around it, and finding no owner, hitched the nag to the sloop's bobstay and hauled as though he would take her home; but of course she was too heavy for one horse to move.
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