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Updated: June 25, 2025
Roughly speaking, Fernando Noronha itself, irrespective of the group of islands at its northeasterly extremity, stretches five miles from east to west, and averages a mile and a half in width. From Cotton-Tree Bay, to which the catamarans had brought the small force, it was barely a mile to the village, convict settlement, and citadel.
It was brought by his Spanish wife, who had accompanied her husband to the Peak, and who came running in, half breathless, to say that the ocean was covered with canoes and catamarans; a fleet of which was paddling directly for the island, being already within three leagues of it.
Sometimes they venture out long distances to sea in their rude canoes, like catamarans, which they contrive out of a couple of branches of a tree and sealskins sewn together with fish-gut, but they never go without their blessed fire, though always carrying it along with them wherever they go, up the mountains, on the beach, in their frail boats, the live embers resting always in the latter on a bed of leaves the reason for this solicitude being, not that they are followers of Zoroaster and worship the god of fire, but because they know the difficulty they would have in rekindling it again if they once allowed it to go out, as Pat Doolan suffered ours to do the other day, when you know the consequences, eh?"
The balsas of Peru, the catamarans and masullah boats of the Coromandel coast, and the flying proas of the South Sea Islands, have all been described before, and their respective merits dwelt upon, by Cook, Vancouver, Ulloa, and others. Each in its way, and on its proper spot, seems to possess qualities which it is difficult to communicate to vessels similarly constructed at a distance.
Neither her captain, Ben Brace of course, nor those of her crew who were capable of reflecting on the future, and providing for its probable contingencies, regretted this inaction, forced upon them by the continuance of the calm. Indeed, although becalmed, the "Catamarans" were not inactive. There was work worthy of their activity, and which occupied them during the whole of the day.
Outside, however, it was much calmer, but as the boats could not carry us all, the commander determined to build two or more rafts or catamarans which might convey all who could not go in the boats, and carry provisions and water. "We hoped to reach the Loo-choo Islands, should we miss Grampus Island, half-way to them.
He fastened the other pair in the same way, and the affair began to look something like catamarans, those funny boats the geographies say folks use in Australasia. But when he nailed the big board on and attached the steering gear, it was easy to see what all the time the Toyman had been planning to make.
Yea, even to the meanest and lowliest soldiers of the armament, whether taken from honest craft and peaceful calling, or the outpourings of Europe's sinks and sewers, catamarans from the Alps, and cut-throats from the Rhine, yea, even among the vilest and the meanest, came the anointed brother of the great Duke, the haughtiest prelate in Christendom, whose heart even then was fixed on the Pontiff's throne there he came, to absolve, and to shrive, and to bless.
The salutes have been fired, and the vessel has been surrounded by a flotilla of surf-boats and catamarans. The commander and the passengers are being rowed ashore, and the Governor with his Councillors, dressed all of them in their smartest official attire, are waiting on the beach outside the Sea-Gate of the Fort to bid them a hearty welcome.
Off the Brazilian coast a head-wind forced the ship to tack repeatedly; she was sometimes so near the land that people could be seen moving, like black dots, along the shore. Native fishermen, mounted upon the high seats of their catamarans the frailest rafts, drifted within hailing distance; and over night the brave ship was within almost speaking distance of Pernambuco.
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