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Updated: June 20, 2025
As soon as they could recover from the shock, Ready and the first mate hastened to the wheel to try to get the ship before the wind; but this they could not do, as, the foremast and mainmast being gone, the mizenmast prevented her paying off and answering to the helm.
This was a fairly roomy and comfortable apartment, plainly but tastefully fitted up, with a mahogany table running lengthwise down the middle, through the centre of which the mizenmast passed down to the depths below.
It bent on one side, the few ropes which held it gave way, and crash it came down over the side. The mainmast stood, but the mizenmast in an instant afterwards followed the foremast, preventing the crew from working the greater number of the guns. However, with those still unencumbered they continued to fire away with the greatest desperation.
Once, when the craft rolled toward us, I thought I caught a glimpse of what might possibly be a hole in her poop deck, just where the mizenmast had once been stepped.
At half-past ten, her mizenmast was shot away, when the frigates changed their position, and attacked her on either quarter. Soon after she began to fire shells. The gale continued all night, with a very heavy sea, and the violent motion of the ships made the labour of the crews most excessive. On the main-deck of the Indefatigable, the men were often to the middle in water.
One thing was certain; light as our draught of water was, and small as was the schooner's area of lateral resistance compared with that of the barque, we were slowly but certainly eating our way out upon her weather quarter, her main and foremasts having been visible to leeward of her mizenmast when the chase commenced, while now they just showed clear of each other to windward, thus conclusively demonstrating that we were gaining the weather-gauge of her, despite the heavy sea.
I thought it a pity to inflict this loss upon the ship, merely to save myself the discomfort of being hauled through the water from one ship to the other, so as soon as the last Frenchman was safely aboard the City of Cawnpore I proceeded to cut and cast adrift the hawser from the barque's mizenmast, and a few minutes later the massive rope's-end flew overboard, quickly followed by the heaving-line, in the end of which I had knotted a bowline for my own accommodation.
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