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We waited until we saw the anchors of both vessels splash into the placid waters of the Cove, and heard the rumble of their cables as they smoked out through the hawse-pipes; then, while the gunners brought the four 68-pounders, loaded with round shot and grape, to bear upon the crowded deck of the pirate schooner, another party raised a rough flagstaff, to which a British ensign had been nailed, and dropped its heel into a socket already prepared for it.
"Now, do you know, gentlemen," he said as he sat down on the cutter's rail, facing us, "this morning I had a dream? I thought I heard some one call out, 'All ready there, for'ard? and I heard the rattle of a cable through the hawse-pipes. Then I woke and looked at the clock it was just half-past seven." "And at half-past seven we let go anchor, a good four miles from here.
Half an hour later the Braybrook Castle had been towed round to a little bay just abreast of "Wreck House," and the tug's engines stopped. "All ready, Lindley?" shouted Lester. "All ready sir." "Then let go." At a tap from Lindley's hammer, the great anchor plunged down, and the flaked out cable roared as it flew through the hawse-pipes, drowning the loud "Hurrah" of the men on board.
Like an avalanche, she shot forward and down as the sea astern struck her with the force of a thousand battering rams, burying her bow to the catheads in the milky foam at the bottom that came on deck in all directions forward, astern, to right and left, through the hawse-pipes and over the rail. The wind began to drop, and by ten o'clock we were talking of heaving her to.
Be this as it may, the fact stood that farmers on the coast who saw her high bow and unmistakable hawse-pipes when she ran in for bait invariably double-locked their barns and chicken-coops, and turned loose all tied dogs when night descended, often to find both dogs and chickens gone in the morning.
"Well, he'll drown there the way she's shipping water through the hawse-pipes. Go for'ard!" Chris commanded, taking charge of things as a matter of course. "Tell him not to worry; that I'm at the wheel.
Of the seven war-ships, the seaworthiness of two was questionable: the Trenton's, from an original defect in her construction, often reported, never remedied her hawse-pipes leading in on the berth-deck; the Eber's, from an injury to her screw in the blow of February 14th.
As she thus crept seaward, she buried bow and stern alternately under the billows. In the fairway of the entrance the flagship Trenton still held on. Her rudder was broken, her wheel carried away; within she was flooded with water from the peccant hawse-pipes; she had just made the signal "fires extinguished," and lay helpless, awaiting the inevitable end.
"Well, he'll drown there the way she's shipping water through the hawse-pipes. Go for'ard!" Chris commanded, taking charge of things as a matter of course. "Tell him not to worry; that I'm at the wheel.
Back from the beach and showing golden-brown among the sunlit green lay the thatched houses of a native village, and as the brig came head to wind, and the cable clattered through the hawse-pipes, the brown-skinned people ran joyously down to their canoes and swarmed off to the ship.
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