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Updated: June 20, 2025
Imagine a respectable charwoman in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk along the streets, and you will come to some faint notion of the appearance of that nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged cargo-boat as she staggered under her new help, shouting and raving across the deep.
I think I saw it, and the wonderful scenery of the Lofoten Islands, in my little Norwegian cargo-boat, under far more favourable auspices than my successors who have travelled in great tourist steamers, surrounded by all the luxuries that are now supplied to the passengers on the large Atlantic and Mediterranean liners.
Her nationality was British, but you will not find her house-flag in the list of our mercantile marine. She was a nine-hundred-ton, iron, schooner-rigged, screw cargo-boat, differing externally in no way from any other tramp of the sea. But it is with steamers as it is with men.
"Nay, if it is indeed so urgent, noble Froeken," he replied, "do not trouble, for there is a means of making the journey. But for you, and in such bitter weather, it seems a cruelty to speak of it. A steam cargo-boat leaves here for Hammerfest and the North Cape to-morrow it will pass the Altenfjord.
"There's a boat just come from behind that big ship, and it's making straight for us," said Jack. "That's queer," said Dent sharply, turning his head to look. "It must have come down stream in shelter of the cargo-boat. I've been keeping a watch on the river round us." He said a few words in the native tongue to the big Shan, and the latter pulled much faster and altered his course a little.
But my motion was a steady and direct one, and I saw that if it continued it would end by laying me aboard of a big steamer having the look of being a cargo-boat that stood out a little from the others and evidently herself had not long been a part of that broken company.
The hold-doors were closing. The object dumped by the control-building went off. It was a chemical-explosive bomb, but its power was adequate. The wall of the building caved in. Flames leaped crazily out of the collapsed heap. The landing-field would be out of operation. The last car skidded to a stop. The two men in it ran for the boarding-stair of the cargo-boat.
Good-bye, my boy, and he waved a fat hand to me. That night I embarked on a cargo-boat which was going round the coast to Delagoa Bay. It is a small world at least for us far-wandering Scots. For who should I find when I got on board but my old friend Tam Dyke, who was second mate on the vessel? We wrung each other's hands, and I answered, as best I could, his questions about Kirkcaple.
I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned passenger-ship turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-had Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the crack in the shaft was spreading.
Ten miles away the cargo-boat swung itself about. Suddenly it was gone. It was on the way to Glamis and the fleet. Another hour of watching. Another blip. It was another cargo-carrier like the first. As the other had done, it meekly permitted itself to be boarded by what it believed were mere naval ratings of the Mekinese space-fleet, searching for a criminal who might be on board.
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