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Updated: June 1, 2025
For a few seconds we were involved in a confused medley of canoes and wreckage, of drowning savages wildly clutching at the gunwales of the boat in an ineffectual effort to save themselves; there was a rattling volley of musketry, a flash or two of cutlass blades, and then away sped the cutter once more. We were through.
They, for their part, wasted no breath on him. "Elizabeth, get in here," the girl's father commanded. It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing gunwales. The girl rose. She cast an appealing glance at MacRae. His face did not alter. She stepped up on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower extended to help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit of the Gull.
The smoke had disappeared to the northward. It was a dead calm. They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank too. Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the boat-sail over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They crept under, out of my sight, thank God! I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one hour's sleep since the day I was born.
"Don't you try to put me out. I'll hang on and kick. Don't you say 'please, either," she warned him. "I must," he protested. "Please don't insist." She scowled like an angry boy, and seized the gunwales firmly. Her expression made him smile despite his annoyance, and this provoked her the more. "I'm going!" she asserted, darkly. This outing had done wonders for both girls.
King Olaf Tryggvasson's men became so furious that they jumped upon the gunwales in order to reach their foes with their swords and kill them, and many went straight overboard; for out of eagerness and daring they forgot that they were not fighting on dry ground, and sank down with their weapons between the ships.
The difficulty was, of course, to get the canoe out of the creek up the steep mud-bank. To that end she was turned on her side, with me on board. I could just manage, by jamming my luggage under my knees, and myself against the two gunwales, to keep in, holding on chiefly by my heels and the back of my neck.
Fifteen minutes later, the little boat, loaded down to her gunwales, set out for the tug. Four oarsmen rowed, one man to the oar. The slow clacking of shafts in tholes echoed sharply from the huge walls of the dock as the dinghy drew away through the burning sunshine.
The indurated bodies of my companions were lying about the decks, washed by the water which poured into the vessel, as she rolled deeply from one side to the other, presenting her gunwales as if courting the admittance of the wave. "Are you, then, tired of your existence, as well as I?" thought I, apostrophising the vessel.
But I could look all down the length of the ship, and there every man was armed, even the rowers. They had hung red and yellow wooden shields all along the gunwales, raising the bulwark against sea and arrow flight alike by a foot and more, and the rowers were fairly in shelter under them, if there was to be a broadside attack.
"What what is that Thing over there on the bank of the bogue?" he called out to the negro servant who was paddling the canoe. He was all unprepared for the effect of his words. Indeed, he was fain to hold hard to the gunwales. For the negro, with a sudden galvanic start, let slip the paddle from his hand, recovering it only by a mighty lunge in a mechanical impulse of self-preservation.
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