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Updated: June 4, 2025
There, dropping noiselessly aboard the Triton brig, he caught the hands asleep, pressed as many of them as he had room for, and with them returned to the ship. Meanwhile, the master of the Triton armed what hands he had left and met Rudsdale's second attempt to board him with a formidable array of handspikes, hatchets and crowbars.
Our only provision was a small barrel of flour, and a five gallon rundlet of brandy, which had been thrown overboard, and was taken up by us. We also took up an old chest, which stood us in good stead, for having but one oar, and our ship's handspikes, and a hatchet being by chance in the boat, we could split the chest, and nail it to the handspikes, which were our oars.
But Young New York, who is far more nautical than I am, and has a big brother in one of the yacht-clubs, derided the idea, and said he must have gone round with the handspikes, when the anchor was hove.
His comrades were scattered about the grinding mass making ineffective efforts to heave a butt or top clear of the others with their handspikes, but there was clearly only one vulnerable point of attack, and that was the one Nasmyth and Gordon were hewing at. Wheeler, who felt the tension, watched them, clutching hard upon an unlighted pipe.
The tackles having been arranged, they lost no time in launching their raft, which they did very successfully, easing it with handspikes; and in a couple of minutes it floated, to their great satisfaction, safely alongside. Their first care was to lash the casks under the bottom. This took some time, but they were well repaid by finding the raft float buoyantly on the very surface of the water.
So Philip Ludwell with two boats went out under cover of darkness. As they approached the ship the soldiers on deck hesitated to fire on them, thinking they were coming at Carver's invitation. So they drew up alongside and clambered in through the gunroom ports. As they rushed up on deck they were joined by the sailors with handspikes, and together they soon forced the soldiers to surrender.
They would have seen pieces of timber, black and charred with fire; fragments of broken spars, with sails and cordage attached and trailing after them; here and there a cask or barrel, sunk to the level of the surface by the weight of its contents; pieces of packing-cases, torn asunder as if by some terrible explosion; cabin-chairs, coops, oars, handspikes, and other implements of the mariner's calling, all bobbing about on the bosom of the blue deep, and carried hither and thither by the arbitrary oscillations of the breeze.
Out of these they formed, with wonderful speed, an exceedingly neat cylindrical raft, between two and three feet in diameter. They next bound the whole closely together by lashings, and filled up all its inequalities with capstan-bars, handspikes, and other small spars, so as to make it a compact, smooth, and uniform cylinder from end to end.
Into these three-masters, these Leviathans of Lake Ontario, the timber, boards, staves, handspikes, &c., from the interior are now shipped, and the timber carried to the head of the St. Lawrence navigation. One step more, and they will, as soon as the canals are widened, proceed from Lake Superior to London without a raft being ever made.
By means of handspikes and chains drawn by horses or oxen, the great timbers were pushed, rolled, and dragged into heaps, and by nightfall the field lay open and ready for the plough requiring, at the most, only the burning of the huge piles that had been gathered.
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