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Updated: May 24, 2025
This business of rounding-to was a very delicate and ticklish job, for had the sea caught us broadside-on we must inevitably have been capsized or swamped; but we were fortunate enough to do everything at precisely the right moment, with the result that the two boats swung round, head-on to the sea, without accident, and without shipping very much water.
There was nothing to be done, no means of escape; for the walls of white water had seemed to leap at us out of the darkness so suddenly that they were no sooner seen than we were upon them; and the only choice left us was whether we would plunge into them stem-on, or be hove in among them broadside-on, as had been the case of the strange ship.
The brig, with a list of about four strakes to port, was hard and fast upon the inner edge of a reef that seemed to be about a mile wide, and stretched for many miles in either direction, ahead and astern, she lying broadside-on to the run of the reef.
I don't know that Bligh saw much in the scenery, but it may have helped to soothe his mind: for by and by he settled himself on the bottom-boards, lit another pipe, pulled his hat over his nose, and lay there blinking at the sky, while the boat drifted up, hitching sometimes in a bough and sometimes floating broadside-on to the current, until she reached this bit of marsh and took the mud very gently.
The oarsmen dipped their starboard oars, sweeping the three boats broadside-on to the beach, and the next moment I was saluted by a shower of bullets and slugs from some twenty jingals.
Yet I could not detect any sign that anything was wrong with her; she was not sitting particularly deep in the water so far as I could judge in the darkness nor did her spars appear to be damaged, except that, as I have already mentioned, her topgallant-masts seemed to have been carried away; there appeared, therefore, to be no reason why we should not venture alongside; and accordingly, as soon as we had stood on far enough to fetch her on the next tack, I hove the boat round and the brig happening to lie broadside-on to the sea ran her alongside to leeward, dousing my sails as we came up abreast the stranger's lee quarter.
In those latitudes the dawn comes as quickly as the daylight vanishes, day comes and goes with a rush thus within five minutes of the time when I first glanced out through the port there was enough light abroad to reveal a louring, overcast, thunder-threatening sky, an inky, oil- smooth, sluggishly undulating sea, and a long, low schooner with tremendously taunt masts raking over her stern, and not an inch of canvas set, lying broadside-on to us at a distance of some two miles to the eastward.
When first discovered she must have been lying nearly broadside-on to us, but the swing of the swell gradually slewed her, as we stealthily approached, until she presented her stern fairly at us, affording us an admirable opportunity to get alongside her undetected.
He ordered the cutters to be dropped under the schooner's stern, and whilst this was being done the springs were veered away and hauled upon until the schooner was brought broadside-on to her former consorts, now her antagonists.
She but dipped a blade twice to check the boat from swinging broadside-on to the tide, and so rested silent for minute after minute, gazing through the gloom towards the bright sea-lights. And it seemed to the Commandant, seated and watching her, that he could read some of the thoughts behind her gaze. Since then and for fifteen years they had been his friends.
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