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Updated: June 6, 2025
In the British navy many most distinguished officers came from anywhere through the hawse-holes, as the expression ran; and a proud boast it should have been at a time when every Frenchman in his position had to be of noble blood. What was all very well for captains and lieutenants, once those ranks were reached, was not so easy for midshipmen.
Her paint is faded, her sails patched, and there is rust along the chains and around the hawse-holes. She might be mistaken for a whaler coming off a four years' cruise. And nearly that length of time has she been cruising, but not after whales.
Thus we had her sparred, all but a bowsprit and jibboom; yet this we managed by making a stumpy, spike bowsprit from one of the smaller spars which they had used to shore up the superstructure, and because we feared that it lacked strength to bear the strain of our fore and aft stays, we took down two hawsers from the fore, passing them in through the hawse-holes and setting them up there.
Wilbur and the Chinamen obeyed, bearing up and down upon the bars till the slack of the anchor-chain came home and stretched taut and dripping from the hawse-holes. "'Vast heavin'!"
'Bob had a good deal to do with barricading the hawse-holes afore we were in action, and the Adm'l and Cap'n both were very much pleased at how 'twas done. When the Adm'l went up the quarter-deck ladder, Cap'n Hardy said a word or two to Bob, but what it was I don't know, for I was quartered at a gun some ways off.
"Now, my lads, bear a hand." All joined in, from the captain to Mark, and in half an hour a cable was run out of one of the hawse-holes, dragged high up the sands, one end taken round a huge mass of rock, tied and lashed, and the other end well stopped in the ship. "There," said the captain, "that's enough. Now for home. Shall we go back the same way?"
Every instant masses of water swept the deck like a deluge, and at each roll of the vessel the hawse-holes, now to starboard, now to larboard, became as so many open mouths vomiting back the foam into the sea. The women had taken refuge in the cabin, but the men remained on deck; the blinding snow eddied round, the spitting surge mingled with it. All was fury.
It was two o'clock on the morning of the 24th of April, when the Confederates on the parapets of their forts might have heard the shrill notes of fifes, the steady tramp of men, the sharp clicking of capstans, and the grating of chain cables passing through the hawse-holes on the ships below.
But now, after a somewhat longer spell than usual of the moderate breeze, the wind quite suddenly increased in force to that of a full gale, swooping down upon us in a mad scuffle that twirled the little craft about like a teetotum for a minute or two as it howled and raved around us, lashing the whole surface of the sea into one unbroken sheet of foam and spray, and then it settled down and began to blow great guns from the northward, whipping up a nasty short, choppy sea into which, within ten minutes, the little schooner was plunging to the height of her hawse-holes.
There was the rattle of a chain, apparently being let out through the hawse-holes of a vessel, then a little more rattling, followed by the disappearance of the light, and silence once more. "What do you make of it, sir?" whispered Tom. As he spoke there came a strange, plaintive, smothered sound, so full of agony that Mark shuddered. "I can hardly tell," he said.
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