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Updated: May 21, 2025
Now all we have got to do is to pull on that endless line, and the life-car, sliding along the upper rope, will spin right out to the vessel, and here she goes!" The life-car was moving along the upper line bound for the wreck. One or two halts occurred on the way, but the venture was ultimately successful, and Charlie saw the life-car as the crew of the wreck eagerly seized it.
It was sent out to the ship Ayrshire, and more than two hundred souls were saved by it when there was no other way of giving them human help. There she is, sir." He laid his hand with a good deal of feeling on the queer shell that hung from the ceiling. The Ottinger life-car, the patent for which the generous inventor gave to the; public, is simply an egg-shaped case with bands of cork about it.
"It's a three-masted schooner," bawled Captain Peters, "and she's where the life-boat can't reach her, but our wreck-gun will. That craft has keeled over on Deep Rock, near the very P'int itself! Get out the gun!" The men now took from the cart a small cannon, then a mass of rope, and then a rope of larger size. "Take out that life-car, too!" shouted Captain Peters.
Then we send over the breeches-buoy," pointing to a complete suit of india-rubber very similar in appearance to that used by Paul Boyton. "One man can be sent safely to shore in that. But we use the life-car most frequently." "A boat?" "You may call it a covered boat if you will. That life-car, sir, was invented by Captain Douglass Ottinger, and this is the first one ever used.
Among the arrivals by the life-car was the skipper of the "White Shield," and there was also a man wrapped in a cloak. "He aint a sailor," said one of the station-hands, criticising the dress of the man in the cloak. "It is the passenger," said Wort. He was a man still young, and his clothes had an outlandish cut. He walked up the beach, the four young knights having preceded him.
It is hung on the hawser by rings at either end and pulled back and forth by the whip-line; or, if the masts of the vessel are carried away and there is nothing to which the heavy rope can be attached so that it will stretch clear above the wave-crests, in such an emergency the life-car floats directly on the water, and the whip-line is used to pull it to the shore with wrecked passengers and back to the wreck for more.
"She's coming back!" he cried. Captain Peters shouted, "Here she comes, my hearties! Pull away on the whip!" This was a title for the endless line. "Suthin' in that life-car!" sang out one of the men. "Not so very much, I guess," said another. "She runs sort of light." How the breakers tried to reach the car! Several times the sea threw itself spitefully, violently upward.
The two men in the rigging kept their hold. The men around the cart sprang for the hawser and tally-blocks to rig the buoy, when a dull cry rose from the wreck. To their horror they saw the mainmast waver, flutter for a moment, and sag over the schooner's side. The last hope of using the life-car was gone!
It did not come. Surely the new world Bob was speeding to must be a kind one, else why should Hag Fate, who had been at the steer-wheel of his life-car during the last five years, carry him safely through what looked a dozen sure deaths? Without slacking speed a jot we swung around the corner of Fortieth into Fifth Avenue.
"Those tackles," resumed John, "help us straighten that second line till it is above the breakers, and now watch 'em here comes the life-car, a sort of box, you see, that we suspend from the upper rope, and at the same time it is hitched to the lower or endless line.
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