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Updated: May 6, 2025
One cut with my sea-gully, and the Hispaniola would go humming down the tide. So far so good; but it next occurred to my recollection that a taut hawser, suddenly cut, is a thing as dangerous as a kicking horse. Ten to one, if I were so foolhardy as to cut the Hispaniola from her anchor, I and the coracle would be knocked clean out of the water.
Here the Commander came in view, conferring mysteriously with the Boatswain over a length of six-inch wire hawser that lay along the upper deck. The Boatswain, with gloom in his countenance, was indicating a section where the strands were flattened and the hemp "heart" protruded in a manner indicating that all was not well with the six-inch wire hawser.
He hove anither life-line to me, an' went astern, an' we had all the weary winch work to do again wi' a second hawser. For all that, Bell was right: we'd along tow before us, an' though Providence had helped us that far, there was no sense in leavin' too much to its keepin'. When the second hawser was fast, I was wet wi' sweat, an' I cried Bell to tak' up his slack an' go home.
It was a seven-inch steel hawser with a Manila tail, which they had taken to the foretopsail-sheet bitts before the jib-boom had gone.
"Go, get the two bowers spliced, and have a kedge bent to a hawser: we'll back our two anchors together, and veer to the better end of two hundred and forty fathoms; it may yet bring her up. See all clear there for anchoring and cutting away the mast! we'll leave the wind nothing but a naked hull to whistle over."
The big hawser strained and groaned, chocks and bitts crooned their song of stress, the wind whistled its dirge, while out from the breakers the Whist hauled her tow. To the wheel of the tug Baldwin glanced ahead and behind, pointed her nose for the breakwater, gave her four bells and the jingle, put his mouth to the tube, and answered, "Yes, Pete, that's right 'twas Bud went.
The Coastguard men, having hauled in the hawser until the mast was brought close under the cliff, the rocket apparatus was returned to the waggon, in which also the mate and the captain's son were placed, and we then all set off to the Coastguard station. The lieutenant invited us to remain at his cottage until the morning.
The post itself might go, but not without me, or I without it. From that time forward I was as much part of the signal-staff as the barrel at its top indeed, more, I fancy for a ship's hawser would not have bound me faster to it than did the flaps of that strong corduroy. Had the keeping close to the signal-staff been all that was wanted I should have done well enough, but, alas!
Kieran, strolling to the taffrail, resumed his study of the tossing ship's wake and the cavorting barge in tow. When he seemed to have settled the matter to his satisfaction, he seated himself on the other towing bitt. "You can get an idea into your head and sometimes it'll swing you around like that barge on the end of that hawser, won't it? Or perhaps your mind don't run that way?"
I fancy not many of us believed this; if the ship had been got off we should have brought up at Kiel, and not at any Danish port. And, as the tug Captain said afterwards, if he had towed the ship off the Germans would have most likely cut the hawser directly afterwards, he would have received no pay for his work, and we certainly should not have landed in Denmark.
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