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Updated: June 16, 2025
It took about eight hours to clear the wreck, all hands working all night; and a very forlorn appearance the deck presented in the morning, lumbered up with broken spars, ropes, &c. The jibboom fell right across the forefoot of the yacht, and now looks as if it had been cut at for weeks with some blunt tool.
The ship's boat was hanging on the weather davits, and it was no use letting her down to windward on account of the heavy sea. Davy ran out to the end of the jibboom with a lead line. He could see the second mate hanging on to the keel of the capsized boat, and his two men in the water.
All, that is, but a terror-stricken few, who lay along the jibboom like flies upon a stick: all but two or three more whom we left fatally hesitating in the forechains: all but the selfish savages who had been the first to perish in the pinnace, and one distracted couple who had thrown their children into the kindly ocean, and jumped in after them out of their torment, locked for ever in each other's arms.
About two o'clock this morning the yacht plunged so heavily into a deep sea, that the jibboom, a beautiful spar, broke short off, and the foretop-gallant mast and topgallant yard were carried away almost at the same moment, with a terrible noise.
While the damage on the Constitution was less, it clogged her action, but she secured a position from which she delivered two raking broadsides. Then as the vessel see-sawed, the jibboom of the Guerriere crossed the Constitution's quarter deck. Both crews made ready to board, but each found the other so fully prepared that neither attempted it.
After half an hour of incessant broadsides, the two vessels had approached each other so close, that the jibboom of the Frenchman was pointed between the fore and main rigging of the Portsmouth.
One of the men, old Growles, scrambled on to the bowsprit, to which he held on like grim death, but before the other man could follow his example, the jibboom was carried away and he with it. I saw the poor fellow struggling amid the foaming seas. The captain did not on this occasion refuse to try to save him.
Bill ordered one of the men to get out to the jibboom end with a piece of pork, and heave it as far ahead as he could fling. No sooner did the creature see the tempting bait than he darted forward, and turning round to seize it exposed the white under side of his body to a blow from Bill's harpoon, driven home with right good will.
Hawsepipe undertaking with the assistance of the others to cut the yards adrift and separate the topmast from the lower-mast, I took another cruise with the warp, and was fortunate enough, after swimming about for over an hour, to bag a half-burned hen-coop with four dead fowls still therein, three hatches, and the remains of the mainmast with topmast attached, the latter spar being still in good enough condition to be serviceable, and the jibboom.
I found her age in the structure of her bows, the headboards of which curved very low round to the top of the stem, forming a kind of well there, the after-part of which was framed by the forecastle bulkhead, after the fashion of ship-building in vogue in the reign of Anne and the first two Georges. Her topmasts were standing, but her jibboom was rigged in.
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