Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
This place is very convenient both for wooding and watering, and in the river there is an immense quantity of oysters and other shell-fish: I have for this reason given it the name of Oyster River. But for a ship that wants to stay here any time, the best and safest place is in the river at the head of the bay, which, from the number of mangrove trees about it, I have called Mangrove River.
The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly, and this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned me, and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief. The first thing I knew a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me.
It appeared that the sudden evanishment of the boats from our sight was due to the fact that they had discovered and pushed into a narrow channel running to the northward and eastward between the two westernmost islands of the group; along which channel they had proceeded for about half a mile when they suddenly opened a tiny bay, on their starboard hand, from the shore of which projected a long wooden jetty of rough mangrove piles decked over with ship timber.
He's after a school of ballyhoos or mossbunkers .... There's Roustabout Key just ahead," he finished as their launch rounded an outcrop of rock and came in view of a mile-long wooded island a bare thousand yards off the weather bow. A mangrove fringe covered the shoreline, two thirds of the way around the key.
Now our real troubles began, for our object was not only to reach the peninsula but also to land upon and walk across it until a spot could be found from which, unseen ourselves, we could obtain a clear view of the creek and everything in it, and upon approaching the shore of the peninsula we discovered that, in common with as much of the river bank as we had yet seen, it consisted, first of all, of a wide belt of soft, fathomless mud overgrown with mangrove trees; the mud being of such a consistency that to attempt to walk upon it would mean being swallowed up and suffocated in it, for a sixteen-foot oar could be thrust perpendicularly into it with scarcely any effort, although when one of the men incautiously tried the experiment, it was only with the utmost difficulty that he was able to withdraw the oar, so tenaciously did the mud cling to it.
Giving Jake the helm, Dick crawled under the foredeck, where the floorings were drier than anywhere else, and lay smoking and thinking until day broke. The light, which grew brighter rapidly, showed a glistening line of surf to seaward and mangrove forest on a point ahead. Beyond this there seemed to be an inlet, and then the shore curved out again.
To the north Boucher did good work, twice turning the fugitives back when they attempted to gain the coast. One by one the boys were captured. In the first man-drive through the mangrove swamp Seelee caught two. Circling around to the north, a third was wounded in the thigh by Boucher, and this one, dragging behind in the chase, was later gathered in by Seelee's hunters.
At first it hung just above the mangrove bushes, and we could see the tops of a few lofty palm-trees on shore, and some distant mountains popping their heads above it; but by degrees they and the whole scene before us were immersed in it. The people's breakfast was just over when the captain came on deck. "No success, Mr Rawson, last night," said he. "We'll try my plan now.
The banks of this river are low and sandy, and a short distance above where we joined it, it is skirted on either side by a thick mangrove swamp, for the distance of about a mile, where it joins the freshwater swamps, covered with thick scrub. On my proceeding up the river, it became narrower in its channel as it approached the swamps, from which it appeared to be principally supplied.
The first leg of our journey ended at Borneo, leaving us as unacquainted with officers and seamen, save in the surface details of personal appearance, as we had been at Port Said. Now we were dropping Sandakan harbor over the stern. Already the sprawling, hillside town, framed in its mangrove swamps, was lost around the buttress of the harbor's sentinel rock.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking