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Updated: June 13, 2025
The boats having been gently and carefully lowered into the water without a splash, or so much as a single tell-tale squeak from the tackle-blocks the pins and bushes of which were habitually overhauled at frequent intervals and kept well lubricated with a mixture of melted tallow and plumbago the crews took their places, each man carefully depositing his drawn cutlass on the bottom-boards between his feet, and we shoved off with muffled oars, the three boats pulling abreast, with about a ship's length between each; so that if perchance we should happen to be seen, we should present as small a target as possible to aim at.
He lit the candle and carried it to the cupboard; opened this, and peered into the well at his feet: lifted one of the loose bottom-boards, and, holding himself steady by a grip on the scurtain, thrust a naked leg down, feeling into vacancy. The ball of his foot touched some substance, hard and apparently firm.
His eyes were half-closed again, and he saw outlines of strong ragged men staggering down to a lonely cove at night, with their marble burden, and he heard the autumn gale howling among the rocks, and the soft thud of the baled statue as it was laid in the bottom of the little fishing craft; and then, because the men feared the weather, he was in the boat himself, shaming them by his courage, loosing the sail, bending furiously to one of the long sweeps, yelling, cheering, cursing, promising endless gold, then baling with mad energy as the water swirled up and poured over the canvas bulwark that Greek boats carry, and still wildly urging the fishermen to keep her up; and then, the end, a sweep broken and foul of the next, a rower falling headlong on the man in front of him, confusion in the dark, the crazy boat broached to in the breaking sea, filling, fuller, now quite full and sinking, the raging hell of men fighting for their lives amongst broken oars, and tangled rigging and floating bottom-boards; one voice less, two less, a smashing sea and then no voices at all, no boat, no men, no anything but the howling wind and the driving spray, and he himself, Logotheti, gripping a spar, one of those long booms the fishermen carry for running, half-drowned again and again, but gripping still, and drifting with the storm past the awful death of sharp black rocks and pounding seas, into the calm lee beyond.
"Oh, there you are!" he said, looking much relieved, "Swim ashore; I'll look after your boat." So Tom swam ashore, and stood there dripping and watching the other righting his tub and collecting the sculls and bottom-boards floating here and there in the pool. Tom had time to look him well over, and was well satisfied with the inspection.
Anyway I opened my eyes at last night it was, an' all the stars blazin' an' the boat was empty all except me an' Jeff Tresawna, him that had bled to death. He was lying up high in the bows, wi' his legs stretched Out towards me along the bottom-boards.
They are all fitted with bottom-boards; and I am of opinion that, if the triangular bottom-board in the stern-sheets is suspended over the lee side amidships by means of short lengths of line bent on to two of the corners, the arrangement will serve as a lee-board, and the boats will go to windward, although their speed may be slightly decreased.
"Whatever it is, it is white-face work," said the Adjutant; "and for my own part, I would not lie out upon a place so near to it as this bar." "You do not know the English as I do," said the Mugger. "There was a white-face here when the bridge was built, and he would take a boat in the evenings and shuffle with his feet on the bottom-boards, and whisper: 'Is he here? Is he there?
There lay the big lout of fifteen, who already boasted of his love-affairs, learned German, and was to be a gentleman like his father there he lay on the bottom-boards in the bow in a dead faint. The others were frightened at first, but Peer, who was sitting washing his wounded arm, took a dipper full of water and flung it in the unconscious one's face.
At all events I should like to give the plan a trial; so get your bottom-boards rigged at once, gentlemen, if you please, somewhat after the fashion of this affair that I have arranged."
A large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked, rolled out on the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man. Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these men were not sailors.
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