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Updated: July 15, 2025
I clambered up a couple of hundred feet, and from that height the bay, the coasts of Spain, and sleeping Africa, robed in the azure hue of distance, and the numerous sail, some under way, and others lying like so many cock-boats, as seen from the height, at their anchors the latteen craft speaking of the far East, &c. Statue of General Elliot.
Then the wind fell by the decree of Allah Almighty and the sun shone out; whereupon Sayf al-Muluk opened his eyes and seeing no sign of the ships nor aught, but sky and sea, said to the Mamelukes who were with him, "Where are the carracks and cock-boats and where is my brother Sa'id?"
The simple people, coasting along in their light balsas or rafts, had seen the coming of what to them were then wondrous ships, cock-boats, though, as compared even to our collier brigs.
As we pass through the slightly overhung mouth, we can hardly complain with a late traveller of the Gaboon's "sluggish waters;" during the ebb they run like a mild mill-race, and when the current, setting to the north-west, meets a strong sea-breeze from the west, there is a criss-cross, a tide-rip, contemptible enough to a cruizer, but quite capable of filling cock-boats.
Like the lackeys in Molière's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship of war bearing down upon two cock-boats.
In the end, the unhappy manuscript, after many refusals, was converted into cock-boats, hats, and paper dollies for little Dot; and its various intermediate reverses need enter no further into the main thread of this history.
Like the lackeys in Moliere's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship of war bearing down upon two cock-boats.
Even short of the unbroken drudgery which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time, to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year and those not the cock-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions could leave little time or inclination for extensive letter-writing.
These then so great and so many pleasures, that run like perpetual springs and rills, these men decline and avoid; nor will they permit those that put in among them so much as to take a taste of them, but bid them hoist up the little sails of their paltry cock-boats and fly from them.
At one spot lay a huddle of white-walled houses, a mere splotch in the distance; while four tiny cock-boats, which lay beyond, marked the position of three of Her Majesty's 10,000-ton troopers and the admiral's flagship. But it was not upon the distant town, nor upon the great vessels, nor yet upon the sinister white litter which gleamed in the plain beneath them, that the Arab chieftains gazed.
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