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Updated: May 19, 2025
She lay within a stone's throw, a mighty vessel, huge of beam and length, her superstructure towering proudly aloft, her massive armoured sides sweeping up in noble curves, a Super-Dreadnought complete from trucks to keelson.
There was no passage from the forepeak into the hold, as the collision bulkhead ran from the keelson right up to the deck; and, Jack having pointed out this fact, the party emerged on deck and descended into the officers' quarters, proceeding from thence down into the main hold, where they found nothing but iron ballast and the water tanks, every one of which Jack insisted should be opened and looked into.
As soon as they had recovered a moderate command of their senses, Burdette and Portman hurried below to find out what damage had been sustained by the yacht; but, although she must have been greatly strained and might be leaking through some open seams, the tough keelson of the well-built vessel, running her length like a stiff backbone, had received and distributed the shock, and although her bowsprit was shivered to pieces and her cut-water splintered, her sides were apparently uninjured.
Long before the vessel reached the capes, he was at home in her, from her truck to her keelson, and Captain Crutchely remarked to his chief mate, the day they got to sea, that "young Mark Woolston was likely to turn up a trump." As for Mark himself, he did not lose sight of the land, for the first time in his life, altogether without regrets.
"Ay, strake and keelson, as good a one as though I had got my sap in the Maine forests. A plague of monarchs, say I. They are a blotch upon modern civilization. And I have here," he continued, tapping his pocket, "some letters writ to the Virginia printers, signed Demosthenes, which Mr. Randolph and Mr. Henry have commended.
The last time he brought his vessel home from New Orleans he was in that pore to get back to his wife an' childer, he ripped along the Gulf Stream and pretty well ribbed the keelson out of her. Thought, I reckon, that since all the shareholders belonged to his family th' expense wouldn' be grudged. But I guess it made her tender. That's how she came to go down so suddent." "She foundered?"
Solid iron from keelson to turret-top, clinging to anything for safety, if the Monitor should go down, would only insure a share in her fate. No mast, no spar, no floating thing, to meet the outstretched hand in the last moment. The sea, like the old-world giant, gathered force from each attack.
Sometimes a canal boat, which the week before had been loaded with lime or potatoes, would be scoured out with a fire-hose, its deck roofed with awnings and hung with lanterns, its hatches lined with palms, and in the hold below a table spread of such surprising beauty, and in an interior so gorgeous in its appointments that each guest, as he descended the carpeted staircase leading from the deck above to the carpeted keelson below, would rub his eyes wondering whether he had not been asleep, and had suddenly awakened aboard Cleopatra's barge.
He retained, however, sufficient presence of mind neatly to disarm Phinuit before that one guessed what he was about. After that second blow, the Sybarite remained at a standstill, but the continued beating of her engines caused her to quiver painfully from trucks to keelson, as if in agonies of death such as those which had marked the end of Popinot.
They know, from experience, that cheap clothes and cheap ships do not answer; that both are apt to fail at the very moment their services are most required; and a good officer, therefore, spares no expense or trouble in seeing that everything is good and sound on board his ship, from keelson to truck, below and aloft. Such a man was our friend Captain Bowse.
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