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All the men clung to the gunnels; but one who was a powerful swimmer struck out for the shore. The canoes stranded on the shore below and the clinging men saved themselves. When they looked for their friend who had struck out for the shore, he was no longer to be seen. These men were all from Goderich, brought up on the banks of Lake Huron. A similar fate befell a crew of four men from Toronto.
The sounds of the instruments floated along the flowing and smooth water, reaching the ears and attracting the attention of many who, for a time, rested from their labour, or hung listlessly over the gunnels of the vessels, watching the boats, and listening to the harmony.
He had heaps o' slaves, an' owned a black brigantine, that he sailed in on secret voyages, an', when he come back, the decks an' the gunnels was often bloody, but nobody knew why or wherefore. He was a big man with black hair an' very violent. He could never have kept no help, if he hadn't owned 'em, but he was so rich, that people respected him, in spite of all his crimes.
"I'm afraid you don't take very much stock in the 'friendly interest," he said, with a constrained little laugh. "I'm not taking stock in anything new just now," replied Thorpe, lending himself lazily to the other's metaphor. "I'm loaded up to the gunnels already." A minute of rather oppressive silence ensued. Then Plowden ventured upon an opening.
But it was likely to be broken up, so that the materials in it could be used for building purposes. Before sawmills became common, lumber was a precious commodity, and hundreds of pioneer cabins in the Ohio Valley were built partly or wholly of the boards and timbers taken from the flatboats of their owners. Even the "gunnels" were sometimes used in Cincinnati as foundations for houses.
I found him leaning over the gunnels of the wind'ard nest of dories when I went on deck, gazing out on a sea that was no longer oily-smooth, though smooth enough, too, what was to be seen of it, under the stars of a winter night. I stood on the break and likewise looked about me.
With square, massive bows they thicken away aft, until, curving upwards with a bold sweep of the gunnels, their covered-in sterns, high above the balanced rudder, form good quarters for the lowdah and his family, where from tiny windows women and children peep in shy curiosity at the foreigner sailing by.
Then we laid two lengths of the stout canvas the full length of the boat over the whaleback, overlapping and nailing them to the same, so that they sloped away down over the gunnels upon each side as though they had formed a roof to us.
The danger which we were about to incur was fully evident to the crowds which were assembled on the beach; not only the pilots, who stood there ready to assist us some with ropes with iron hooks at the end of them others all ready to dart into the surf to hold on the boat, or, if required, to link their arms together, so as to form a living chain which the undertow could not drag away with it; higher up, women and children, their clothes driven by the furious gale, with one hand holding on their caps, and with the other supporting themselves by the gunnels of the boats hauled up, the capstans, or perhaps an anchor with its fluke buried in the shingle, were looking on with dismay and with beating hearts, awaiting the result of the venturous attempt, and I soon discovered the form of Bessy, who was in advance of all the others.
And I continued to lie in the sand and listen. These wanderers made my oyster-piracy look like thirty cents. A new world was calling to me in every word that was spoken a world of rods and gunnels, blind baggages and "side-door Pullmans," "bulls" and "shacks," "floppings" and "chewin's," "pinches" and "get-aways," "strong arms" and "bindle-stiffs," "punks" and "profesh."
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