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Updated: May 9, 2025
We had halted at the foot of the rapids. The canoes were moored to trees on the bank, at the tail of the broken water. The two old canoes, although one of them was our biggest cargo-carrier, were water-logged and heavy, and one of them was leaking. In the night the river rose. The leaky canoe, which at best was too low in the water, must have gradually filled from the wash of the waves.
Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and experienced premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore, a cargo-carrier that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate.
A single very capacious cargo-carrier might have to go first to one place and supply the ships there, and then go to supply the remaining ships lying at another anchorage. This would cause loss of time. The same amount of cargo distributed amongst two or more vessels would permit the ships at two or more places to be supplied simultaneously.
"I might ask, sir," Dag Daughtry brazened it, "for your own papers. This ain't no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier, no more than you gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners, with regular offices, doin' business in a regular way.
"It'd a-ben a grace had I died years ago," he said, "rather than to a- lived to see sailors an' ships pass away from the sea." "But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest," I urged. "So she is . . . to-day. But what is she? a damned cargo-carrier. She ain't built for sailin', an' if she was there ain't no sailors left to sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers!
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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