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Updated: May 28, 2025
The rumbling of the great hempen cable out through the hawse-pipe served as a signal to some dozen or more of poor scurvy-stricken wretches who lay gasping in their hammocks in the stifling forecastle.
Conned by Willoughby, who was acting master, the lively little Wasp swept round into the wind, fore-reaching magnificently in stays, and then paying smartly off on the starboard tack; and as she did so our three starboard pop-guns barked out, one after the other, and I saw the splinters fly white as the shot struck, close together, about half-way between her starboard hawse-pipe and her cathead, just at the precise moment when she was dead end-on to us.
The word was given, the cable slipped through the hawse-pipe with a roar, the screw revolved, and the Satsuma swung round in a circle and headed northward for Wei-hai-wei. The sound of the cable running out alarmed the crew of the store-ship, and the concert ceased abruptly.
Arrived upon the forecastle we found both anchors stowed inboard and the cables below; but, all hands being called, including the Shark's, we made short work of the business, for while one gang went below and cleared away the cable, another roused it up on deck and rove it through the hawse-pipe, ready for bending, and a third got the anchor outboard.
It appears from many recently printed allusions to the mutiny that the magazine editors rightly judged their public. Bligh's first visit to the South Seas was when, under Cook, he sailed as master of the Resolution in 1776-9. A native of Plymouth, of obscure parentage, he was then about twenty-three years old, and had entered the service through the "hawse-pipe."
The tug's cable had scarcely ceased to rattle through the hawse-pipe when the opening shots, delivered through a megaphone, rang out across the water. "'Ullo! Web-feet!" bellowed a raucous voice. "Yeer! Where be tu?" A roar of laughter followed this sally. The occupants of the tug were taken by surprise.
Men sprang overboard with ropes, which they fastened to the buoys; then they swam back, and for an hour or two the whole crew was busy getting the boats to the davits and the end of the cable into the hawse-pipe. The man on the beach recognized the craft he had seen when he wakened.
There was then only one turn of the chain round the drum, enough in ordinary weather to prevent it running out. But now my first heave on the winch-lever started it slipping, and in an instant it was whizzing out of the hawse-pipe and overboard. I tried to stop it with my foot, stumbled at a heavy plunge of the yacht, heard something snap below, and saw the last of it disappear.
There was no perilous passage through the reef, no emerald surf and azure sea nothing but a warm soft land, a motionless lagoon, and tiny beaches on which swam dark-skinned tropic children. The sea had disappeared. The Snark's anchor rumbled the chain through the hawse-pipe, and we lay without movement on a "lineless, level floor."
The men roused the cable in to the inspiriting strains of a lively "shanty;" and before long Rogers' voice was heard announcing the news that the twenty-fathom shackle was inside the hawse-pipe.
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