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The headquarters of this temporary squadron was at Pensacola; but until her unlucky visit to the Rio Grande my ship, the Muscoota, one of the iron double-ender paddle steamers which the war had evolved among other experiments, lay for some months at Key West, then, as always from its position, a naval station of importance.
She was an old East Boston ferry-boat, a "double-ender," admirable for river-work, but unfit for sea-service. She drew seven feet of water; the Planter drew only four; but the latter was very slow, and being obliged to go to St. Simon's by an inner passage, would delay us from the beginning.
But, scarce remarked amid that craft of deep-sea giants, another class of craft, the Island schooner, circulates low in the water, with lofty spars and dainty lines, rigged and fashioned like a yacht, manned with brown-skinned, soft-spoken, sweet-eyed native sailors, and equipped with their great double-ender boats that tell a tale of boisterous sea-beaches.
The boat retraces its course without turning round, as it is a "double-ender." On reaching the other side of the river we simply walk out of the boat as we should out of a house on the street-level. The tidal difficulty is met by making the landing-stage a floating one, and of such length that the angle it forms with terra firma is never inconvenient.
By mid-afternoon, in a huge sea, with the wind after its last shift no more than a stiff breeze, the Tongan bosun sighted a schooner bottom up. The Uncle Toby's drift took them across the bow and they could not make out the name; but before night they picked up with a small, round-bottom, double-ender boat, swamped but with white lettering visible on its bow.
Two ships, the Peruvian corvette America, and the United States "double-ender" Wateree, were carried nearly half a mile to the north of Arica beyond the railroad which runs to Tacna, and there left stranded high and dry. This enormous wave was considered by the English vice-consul at Arica to have been fully fifty feet in height.
This shameless little double-ender, with two heads and one body-two cherries on a single stem, as it were-has been for many moons afflicting our simple soul with an itching desire that she might die-the nasty pig! Two half-girls, joined squarely at the waist, and without any legs, are not a pleasant type of the coming woman.
Simultaneously Queen's hatred of Eskimos received an impetus; and joined by the now aroused Spot, she started off the trail toward the unconscious cause of her deep-seated antipathy. "A double-ender," groaned George; "dead birds, and an Eskimo.
And you get to regard it so, as the days and the weeds lengthen. Observation. Nevertheless, what a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. The hoe is an ingenious instrument, calculated to call out a great deal of strength at a great disadvantage. The striped bug has come, the saddest of the year. He is a moral double-ender, iron-clad at that. He is unpleasant in two ways.
The first successful steamboat for commerce was, as is well known, Robert Fulton's flat-bottomed side-wheeler Clermont, which in August, 1807, made the 150 miles from New York to Albany in 32 hours. During the war of 1812 Fulton designed for coast defense a heavily timbered, double-ender floating battery, with a single paddle-wheel located inside amidships.
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