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Updated: June 1, 2025
"Up with it, then, men," returned the skipper; and in another minute, for we were only in some six-fathom water, the anchor-stock showed itself above the surface and was run up to the cathead.
It was blowing brisk, the sea breaking in snow upon the weather bow, the sky overcast with clouds, and the schooner washing through it under a single-reefed mainsail and whole topsail. It was noon: I was taking an observation, when Pitt at the tiller sang out "Sail ho!" and looking, I spied the swelling cloud-like canvas of a vessel on a line with our starboard cathead.
One speaker went so far as to express a wish that his employer was lashed under the cathead; and, since the cathead was never above water, the suggestion was received with much applause. The "Wansbeck" had sailed on the 8th of the month, and until the 11th the pumps were kept constantly going. The morning of the 12th broke with a wan glare in the sky, and a tremendous sea came away.
Twenty-three guns lay dismounted; her starboard quarter gallery had been carried away, and her best bower anchor with the starboard cathead was towing under her stem. Her brave Captain was mortally wounded, and she had three officers, eleven marines, and thirty seamen killed, and three officers, nineteen marines and ninety-one seamen wounded.
But an artifice was practised to prevent her heading into the harbor's mouth, the line having been brought inboard abaft her larboard cathead, a circumstance which necessarily gave her a sheer in the contrary direction, or to the eastward of the entrance.
Stalking glasses and binoculars were levelled at the unconcerned fowl, who sat by the "cathead" with perfect composure, and preened himself after his long flight. The striking of "four bells" just under his beak unnerved him somewhat, and he departed in a great fuss and pother.
We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead.
A man on the spritsail yard with the lead, another on the cathead with a handful of the line coiled up, another in the fore chains, another in the waist, and another in the main chains, each with a quantity of the line coiled away in his hand. "All ready there, forward?" "Aye, aye, sir!" "He-e-e-ave!"
He had waited to stand up until he heard the blow of one of the heavy billows as it careered before the gale, coming against the bows in due rotation, and the instant he heard this he raised himself erect at once, receiving part of the deluge that broke over the cathead in a fountain of spray on his exposed head and hairy face, the impromptu shower bath making him appear like a dripping merman fresh from the briny deep.
The Sandwich lay that morning above Blackstakes, the headmost ship of the fleet, and at the moment when Parker leapt from her cathead scaffold a boat containing his wife shot out into the stream. He was run up to the yard-arm before her very eyes. She was again too late. He hung there for an hour.
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