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Updated: June 15, 2025
"Captain, my boy," said Bangs, "I honor your profession; but, nevertheless, have no great desire to belong to it. I am satisfied that no persuasion or bribery can ever induce me to make my home on the deep; and, indeed, viewing the thing closely " "By the mark two fathoms less three quarters," called out the leadsman.
The mist very gently rises off the river and wanders away in the tree-tops and climbs the distant mountains slowly, and the warm sun comes out to dry everything. The anchor is up again and its "paddle and go," the leadsman is at his chant again.
The leadsman, in his pea jacket and shag trowsers, with the raindrop hanging to his nose, and a large knot in his cheek from a junk of tobacco therein stowed, with pale, wet visage, and whiskers sparkling with moisture, while his long black hair hung damp and lank over his fine forehead and the stand up cape of his coat, immediately presented himself at the door, with the lead in his claws, an octagonal shaped cone, like the weight of a window sash, about eighteen inches long, and two inches diameter at the bottom, tapering away nearly to a point at top, where it was flattened, and a hole pierced for the line to be fastened to.
Captain Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every current. Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon.
"Six fathoms!" came the voice of the leadsman from the chains. "We can stand in some way farther yet," commented Cavendish. "I want to take the ship in as near as I can, so that the men may not have far to pull in the boat. Furthermore, gentlemen, by the look of the sky, methinks that a gale is brewing, and it will be well that the boat get not too far away from the ship."
But no sound came from the shore just then, and the officers were in a state of uncertainty in regard to the situation which allowed them to do nothing. They waited for half an hour, when the leadsman reported that the water was shoaling, which indicated that the Teaser was drifting towards the island.
"I don't know the words," replied her partner plaintively; "I only 'knows the toon," as the leadsman said to the Navigator. So the children supplied the words to the men's bass accompaniment; the Captain and his wife linked hands.
"Five and a half fathoms!" chanted the leadsman a few minutes later. "'Tis well. Still keep her going as she is," ordered the captain.
I wished that the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there, be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below.
The flat-iron crept up to it cautiously, and a leadsman took soundings all around it from a dinghy, while Bai-Jove-Judson smoked and thought, with his head on one side. "About seven feet, isn't there?" said he. "That must be the tail end of the shoal. There's four fathom in the fairway. Knock that buoy down with axes. I don't think it's picturesque somehow."
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