Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 9, 2025
The jaunty rake of her air-shafts, like stacks of a liner, the sweep of her clean freeboard up to her shining rail, the ease of her bows, the graceful boldness of her overhang all were familiar enough to me. She was my boat, and once I was wont to enjoy her.
"But I thought flying-fish went ever so much higher than that!" said the boy. "I'm sure I've read of their landing on the decks of vessels!" "They do," was the answer; "they are attracted by the glare of the lights and fall on board. But that is generally on sailing vessels with a low freeboard.
One lay senseless on deck, and two or three were bleeding from splinter wounds; for the enemy, her freeboard being lower by a foot or two than the wall sides of the Lady Nepean, had done little execution on deck, whatever the wounds in our hull might be. "I beg your pardon, Captain " "Seccombe, sir, is my name. Alpheus Q. Seccombe, of the Manhattan schooner."
She was long, narrow, of extremely low freeboard, and slight depth of hold; a galley of 125 feet between perpendiculars would perhaps be 180 feet over all taking in the poop and the prow. A galley of this length would only have a beam of 19 feet and a depth of hold of 7 feet 6 inches.
Striking out to the left, still followed by the Gujarati, he swam along past the sterns of the lashed vessels until he came under the side of the one nearest the shore. He caught at the hempen cable, swarmed up it, and, the gallivat having but little freeboard, soon reached the bulwark. There he paused to recover his breath and to listen.
After the cruisers passed the craft of comparatively small tonnage and power follow the gun-boats, transports, and supply ships; and, almost forgotten, the monitors, riding undisturbedly, like squat little forts afloat, with freeboard so low that with a slightly undulating sea a turtle could swim aboard. And after them the destroyers, which look their name.
Long before this time the lessons of the Civil War had hastened the adoption of armor, the new ships ranging from high-sided vessels with guns in broadside, as in the past, to low freeboard craft influenced by the Monitor design, with a few large guns protected by revolving turrets or fixed barbettes, and with better provision for all-around fire.
Dreamily I watched the craft creep by upon the moving tide, noted the low freeboard, almost awash, the careful helmswoman, and the dog on the forecastle yapping at the distant shore and thought of Ruth Bellingham. What was there about this strange girl that had made so deep an impression on me? That was the question that I propounded to myself, and not for the first time.
Added to this, she pitched every now and then as if she were going to dive into the depths of the ocean; and, when she rose again in recovering herself, it seemed as if she were going down bodily by the stern, the surge of the sea along the line of ports in the cabin bearing out the illusion as it swelled up above her freeboard.
In mid-channel it blew hard and the destroyers seemed to be making heavy weather of it, now lost in spray, now showing a glistening height of freeboard, and, as I watched, remembering why they were there, my cumbrous life belt grew suddenly very comfortable.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking