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Updated: September 29, 2025
In some mysterious way order reigned and speed was observed. Line after line of uniformed men passed up the gangways and vanished. Lights were on the ship, yet dim enough to be in keeping with the night's mystery. Last of all the almost muffled noises of gangways being drawn down on to the piers. Hawsers were cast off. Stealthy tugs hauled the ocean monster out into the stream.
Captain von Kessel ordered the stoker's death to be kept secret, particularly requesting the two physicians not to mention it. Formalities had to be gone through, documents had to be drawn up and signed. This kept them busy until dark, when the first call for dinner was trumpeted across the deck and through the gangways of the first-class section.
In old times, I recollect, the fashion was for the men to press aft in a disorganised crowd; but of late years the following more appropriate and orderly arrangement has been universally adopted. The men are distributed in a close double row round the quarter-deck gangways and forecastle, each standing in his place according to the order of his name on the Open List.
A bold attempt was now made by the French to clear their vessel by cutting the fastening of the bowsprit, but the marines of the Portsmouth were prepared for them, and after about twenty gallant fellows had dropped down on the booms and gangways of the Portsmouth, the attempt was given up, and four minutes afterwards the French colours were hauled down.
With the help of officers who knew the ground the Ninety-ninth found room to fall in for roll call. "All present or accounted for!" Then battalion by battalion, a company at a time, the regiment passed on through the dimly lighted pier sheds. On the further side towered the bulwarks of a great ship, with gangways reaching down to the pier.
I heard the engine whistle, the funnel belch out its smoke, the hawsers being thrown off, the gangways being taken in, and then, looking through the porthole, I saw the grey pier gliding behind us. After a few moments, with a feeling of safety and a sense of danger passed, I went up on deck. But oh, how little I knew what bitter pain I was putting myself to!
No sooner had Carthoris and the others joined me than we commenced the transportation of our men through the submerged passage to the mouth of the gangways which lead from the submarine pool at the temple end of the watery tunnel to the pits of Issus. Many trips were required, but at last all stood safely together again at the beginning of the end of our quest.
Finally the waves were so high they dashed themselves over the decks, and no one was allowed above the gangways. The cries of the poor horses, as they felt themselves being washed overboard, were frightful to hear, and many a trooper cried himself as he thought of his horse foundering in the raging sea without.
A crowd of well-dressed, but of an evidently humbler class of persons than those farther aft, were thronging the gangways, little dreaming of the physical suffering they were to endure before they reached the land of promise, that distant America, towards which the poor and oppressed of nearly all nations turn longing eyes in quest of a shelter.
Desperate and frequent were the struggles within gangways so narrow that nothing but daggers could be used, so obscure that the dim lanterns hardly lighted the death-stroke. They seemed the conflicts, not of men but of evil spirits. Nor were these hand-to-hand battles all.
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