Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
I heard a bullet sing over my head and saw one of our own seamen in the waist fall and lie quite still. Should we never answer her in kind? In three minutes, it seemed, we should have to meet her men hand to hand. Now our helmsman luffed, and we came closer into the wind, which gave our guns a chance. "Now, then," Captain Whidden cried, "let them have the long gun and hold the rest."
Breathing the letter, and not the spirit, of the commodore's orders, the captains of these ships luffed at the same time as those which preceded them. It is evident from all this, written by a warm admirer of Suffren, who has had full access to the official papers, that the French chief intended an attack elementary in conception and difficult of execution.
French Pete luffed straight into it, and the Dazzler mounted the steep slope with a rush, poised a moment on the giddy summit, and fell into the yawning valley beyond. Keeping off in the intervals to fill the mainsail, and luffing into the combers, they worked their way across the dangerous stretch.
The helmsman also was to have an eye to the enemy, to luff when she luffed, and "putte roomer," or sail large, when he saw her helmsman put the helm up. If the enemy made signs that she was about to lay the ship aboard, either by loosing more sail, or altering her course, the gunner had to remember certain things.
"We'll know more about it after we've tried her out with the Lucy Foster or the Colleen Bawn or Hollis's new vessel," he said, after a while. One thing we soon found out, and that was that she was a stiff vessel. That was after a squall hit us off Cape Cod. We watched the rest of them then. Some luffed and others took in sail, and about them we could not tell.
But, would you believe it, senor, when she had closed the wreck so that I could see the gun-ports on her upper deck, she luffed up and bore away again, hoisting her tricolour flag, which I shall always loathe the sight of now, as if in mockery of my condition. Fancy, deserting a shipwrecked man like that!"
"No, no; we 've got to fight him till he 's so damaged that he can't get at the rest. Do you see, sir, how the brig lags behind them?" he went on, pointing out toward the slowly escaping squadron. "The boy's got her luffed up so she makes no headway at all!" "I know it. I have signalled to him twice to close with the rest he can sail two feet to their one; but it is no use, he pays no attention.
The cutter luffed just in time, and shot literally from beneath the ship's bows. So close were we, that had the stranger been pitching instead of 'scending at the moment, her jib-boom-end must have passed through the peak of our trysail.
At length we luffed sharply round a low sandy spit thickly covered with mangroves, kept broad away again directly afterwards, and abruptly found ourselves in the main stream of the Congo.
In our flight we had picked up a fisherman snatched him out of his helpless punt as we luffed in a smother of spray, and dragged him aboard, like an enormous frog, at the end of the jib sheet and it was he who now stood at the wheel of our little schooner and took her careening in through the tickle of Harbor Woe.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking