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Updated: June 3, 2025
Wardrop wrote up on the engine-room bulkhead. Fifteen days had gone -fifteen days of killing labour and there was hope before them. It is curious that no man knows how the rods were straightened. The crew of the Haliotis remember that week very dimly, as a fever patient remembers the delirium of a long night.
He had, he thought, deserved well of his country; and if only some one would buy the unhappy Haliotis, moored in the harbour below his verandah, his cup would be full. He looked at the neatly silvered lamps that he had taken from her cabins, and thought of much that might be turned to account. But his countrymen in that moist climate had no spirit.
The council of war clanked off to see if Mr. Wardrop's words were true. He warned them that it was as much as a man's life was worth to enter the engine-room, and they contented themselves with a distant inspection through the thinning steam. The Haliotis lifted to the long, easy swell, and the starboard supporting-column ground a trifle, as a man grits his teeth under the knife.
The stripes were about three inches wide, some plain and others edged like saw-teeth. This was an indication of their mourning for the dead chief in whose honor they had prepared that style of dancing. Strings of haliotis and pachydesma shell beads encircled their necks, and around their waists were belts heavily loaded with the same material.
"He's taken everything else; look!" The Haliotis, except as to her engine-room, had been systematically and scientifically gutted from one end to the other, and there was strong evidence that an unclean guard had camped in the skipper's cabin to regulate that plunder. She lacked glass, plate, crockery, cutlery, mattresses, cuddy carpets and chairs, all boats, and her copper ventilators.
The skipper, bare to the waist, and rowing, could only grind his teeth; and the Governor improved the occasion, and revenged himself for the bitter words in the cables, by saying what he thought of the morals and manners of the crew. The barge returned to the Haliotis in silence, and the skipper climbed aboard, white on the cheek-bones and blue about the nostrils. "I knew it," said Mr.
" It'll be bad enough when it comes." He was not wrong. The pleasant days of towing ended all too soon, though the Haliotis trailed behind her a heavily weighted jib stayed out into the shape of a pocket; and Mr. Wardrop was no longer an artist of imagination, but one of seven-and-twenty prisoners in a prison full of insects.
Then they disappeared over the bulwarks of the Haliotis, and the Governor prayed that they might find occupation inside. Mr. Wardrop's first bound took him to the engine-room; and when the others were patting the well-remembered decks, they heard him giving God thanks that things were as he had left them.
A British ship with a good conscience does not, as a rule, flee from the man-of-war of a foreign Power, and it is also considered a breach of etiquette to stop and search British ships at sea. These things the skipper of the Haliotis did not pause to prove, but held on at an inspiriting eleven knots an hour till nightfall. One thing only he overlooked. She had her choice, and she took it.
The man-of-war was short-handed, and did not see the necessity for putting a prize-crew aboard the Haliotis. So she sent one sublieutenant, whom the skipper kept very drunk, for he did not wish to make the tow too easy, and, moreover, he had an inconspicuous little rope hanging from the stem of his ship. Then they began to tow at an average speed of four knots an hour.
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