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Updated: June 6, 2025
Through all this Sara longed inexpressibly for her father, but knew it was hopeless wishing. All she could do was to intrust the news to a fishing-smack which was about leaving harbor, and might possibly run across the Nautilus somewhere on the broad highway of the ocean.
I strongly suspect his father was a sea-lion and his mother a grampus or scragg whale, and that he was fished up out of the sea when young by some hardy son of Neptune, and subsequently trained up in the ways of humanity on board a fishing-smack, where the food consisted of polypi, lobsters, and black bread. Yet there was something wonderfully genial about this old pilot.
He was busily engaged, endeavouring to count the stars, when that most worthy spinster backed against him and sent him sprawling. She did not even feel the rencontre; it was like an iron-clad coming in collision with a fishing-smack. The little parish school-boy was none the less irritated.
Here was a fresh reason for delay, for surely one must consider what this craft could be, and what had brought her here. She was too small for a privateer, too large for a fishing-smack, and could not be a revenue boat by her low freeboard in the waist; and 'twas a strange thing for a boat to cast anchor in the midst of Moonfleet Bay even on a night so fine as this.
These volunteer soldiers, called together from the plough and the fishing-smack, were free and independent men, unaccustomed to any rule but their own, and they had still to learn the first rudiments of military service.
Their feet crunched gravel and paused where ripples still ran in, endlessly bringing lines of dimmer and dimmer light. A rocking boat was tied to a stake. Anchored and bare-masted, farther out in the mouth of the bay, a fishing-smack tilted slightly in rhythmic motion.
It was not that England cared for the value of three vessels engaged in foreign trade. Still less did she care for the log-huts dignified by the name of a fort. But she was mistress of the seas, and had been since the destruction of the Armada. And as mistress of the seas, she could not tolerate as much as the seizure of a fishing-smack.
This was little Billy's first trip to sea in his father's fishing-smack, and he went not as a passenger but as a "hand." It is probable that there never sailed out of Yarmouth a lad who was prouder of his position than little Billy of the Evening Star. He was rigged from top to toe in a brand-new suit, of what we may style nautical garments.
He had continually threatened to carry me off in a coach to some village by the Channel, and take me across to France in a fishing-smack. When I declared I would ask the magistrates for protection, he said they would laugh at me as a play-actress trying to make herself talked about. I took that to be true, and so, as I've told you, I left London.
"For a long time," says M. Floquet, "there was talk in Normandy of the Count of Marance, who, in the middle of a severe winter, flying with thirty-nine others on board a fishing-smack, encountered a tempest, and remained a long time at sea without provisions, dying of hunger, he, the countess, and all the passengers, amongst whom were pregnant women, mothers with infants at the breast, without resources of any sort, reduced for lack of everything to a little melted snow, with which they moistened the parched lips of the dying babes."
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