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Why had England thrown herself so heroically into the breach, just as the last bulwarks were falling which protected Holland from the overwhelming onslaught of Spain?
Hence, as in the case of all pure women in frontier towns, where rough men foregather, Donna's easily discernible purity had been her most salient protection, and beyond such bulwarks Borax O'Rourke had never dared to venture. It had been a shock, therefore, to Mr. O'Rourke, when he discovered her that August night, crying over a stranger and kissing him.
"The due forms of the law are our heritage from the ages!" he thundered back. "The so-called delays and technicalities are the checks devised by human experience against the rash judgments and rasher actions by the volatile element of society! They are the safeguards, the bulwarks of society! It is better that a hundred guilty men escape than that one innocent man should suffer!"
The ships they evolved were mainly dependent upon their sails, but they carried a bank of oars on each side, for use in light weather. The galley, or longship, had carried guns on a platform at the bows, pointing forward. But these new vessels carried guns in broadside, in addition to the bow-chasers. These broadside guns were at first mounted en barbette, pointing over the bulwarks.
Fifty days more of it and, washed by icy seas, racked and storm-beaten, the vessel made Norfolk Sound. So small was the crew, so imminent the danger that the Indians might take her by boarding, that screens of hides were rigged along the bulwarks to hide the deck from view.
Suddenly, glancing up at the dim cloud of sails above, I saw that we were aback and making sternway. We might have tossed a biscuit aboard the big Serapis as she glided ahead of us. The broadsides thundered, and great ragged scantlings brake from our bulwarks and flew as high as the mizzen-top; and the shrieks and groans redoubled.
The bulwarks on that side had been gradually torn away, so that every instant the risk increased of their being carried overboard. Still, Owen and his companions persevered One only of the apprentices had joined them. "Where are the others?" asked Owen. "They are gone, I am afraid. I saw them standing together trying to lower a boat, when a sea took the whole of them off their legs.
"I reckon that we will be on the rocks in about twenty minutes to half an hour unless you can get her going." The chief engineer muttered something which was not audible above the roar of the wind through the rigging and the wash of the green seas that leapt over the bulwarks of the well-deck. "What?" yelled the captain, leaning over the balustrade.
The ship is ashore on a reef; a total wreck; both masts gone by the board; bulwarks carried away; decks swept, and everything but the galley gone and you and I are all that are left of the crew." "Good Heavens, Billy, you surely don't mean to say that all hands except ourselves are lost!" I exclaimed, in horrified tones.
But the saloon-cabin was so warm down there in the south that I soon went back on deck to hang over the bulwarks for a time, and then go right aft to look down at the sparkling water, all ablaze now as it seemed to rush from both sides of the rudder, where in the daytime all would be white foam.
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