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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Ay, ay, Bill; that's it and no mistake; you've put it to the gentlemen just exactly as we wanted it; what you says, we'll say, and whatever promises you makes we'll keep 'em; we wants another chance, and we hopes that if so be as these here gen'lemen are thinking of topping their booms out of this they'll just take us along with 'em," replied the man who was pulling the bow-oar, the others also murmuring an assent.
They said his surf-boat had reached the steamer, had taken on board a load of soldiers, some eight or ten, and had started back through the surf, when on the bar a heavy breaker upset the boat, and all were lost except the boy who pulled the bow-oar, who clung to the rope or painter, hauled himself to the upset boat, held on, drifted with it outside the breakers, and was finally beached near a mile down the coast.
In this effort he was successful, and had gradually worked himself into the firm belief that the world was paradise, and that he and Minnie were its sole occupants a second edition, as it were, of Adam and Eve when the lieutenant rudely dispelled the sweet dream by saying sharply to the man at the bow-oar "Is that the boat, Baker? You ought to know it pretty well."
Sometimes, when I sit in the chimney-corner of a winter evening, smoking my pipe with my old messmate Tom Lokins, I stare into the fire, and think of the days gone by, till I forget where I am, and go on thinking so hard that the flames seem to turn into melting fires, and the bars of the grate into dead fish, and the smoke into sails and rigging, and I go to work cutting up the blubber and stirring the oil-pots, or pulling the bow-oar and driving the harpoon at such a rate that I can't help giving a shout, which causes Tom to start and cry:
"Give way, men," shouted Mr Austin in a voice which made the leafy archway ring again. "Steer straight for the crocodile, Tom; plump the boat right on him; and, bow-oar, lay in and stand by to prod the fellow with your boat-hook. Drive it into him under the arm-pit if you can; that, I believe, is his most vulnerable part."
But as one of the boats was in the act of entering this creek, the seaman at the bow-oar, who had just entered the service, having inadvertently expressed some fear from a heavy sea which came rolling towards the boat, and one of the artificers having at the same time looked round and missed a stroke with his oar, such a preponderance was thus given to the rowers upon the opposite side that when the wave struck the boat it threw her upon a ledge of shelving rocks, where the water left her, and she having kanted to seaward, the next wave completely filled her with water.
In this effort he was successful, and had gradually worked himself into the firm belief that the world was paradise, and that he and Minnie were its sole occupants a second edition, as it were, of Adam and Eve when the lieutenant rudely dispelled the sweet dream by saying sharply to the man at the bow-oar "Is that the boat, Baker? You ought to know it pretty well."
As each boat came up it thrust itself into the mass, the man who had pulled the bow-oar taking the end of the long painter in his hand ready for a leap. Some boats' crews, having trans-shipped their trunks, were backing out; others were in the midst of that arduous and even dangerous operation; while still more came pouring in, seeking a place of entrance through the heaving mass.
Bartong, who was being thus freely discussed in the stern of the boat, sat in his place at the bow-oar, pulling a steady stroke and casting serious looks right and left at the banks of the river as they went along.
Again the sail flapped, collapsed, flapped again, and then filled steadily out. "Hurrah, lads!" I exclaimed. "Half a dozen more strokes with the sweeps and the breeze will fairly have got hold of us. See how the sheet tautens out!" "In bow-oar, and stand by to heave your grapnel!"
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