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Above the wreck, too, there still fluttered feebly the flag which Mr Meldrum had attached to the stump of the mizzen-mast, as if defying the powers of the wind and the waters to destroy the gallant old ship and her belongings, strive how they might in all their majesty! Every heart felt glad at the sight.
At length, having lost her fore and main-top-masts, and her mizzen-mast having been shot away to the deck, and her fore-yard lying in two pieces on her shattered forecastle, and in a hundred places having been hulled with round shot, the English frigate was reduced to the last extremity. Captain Cardan ordered his signal quarter-master to strike the flag.
The rigging was found to be ill-fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen-mast, in a heavy lurch to windward, went by the board. For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship, and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet water in the hold.
The gun was well aimed; but the schooner had already passed so far behind the point, that the ball struck a projecting part of the cliff; dashed it into atoms, and, glancing upwards, passed through the cap of the Talisman's mizzen-mast, and brought the lower yard, with all its gear, rattling down on the quarter-deck. When the smoke cleared away, the Avenger had vanished from the scene.
"Why, there, I believe you're more than half right, Sir Gervaise; I overheard a conversation between them one dark night, when they were propping the mizzen-mast under the break of the poop, and the surgeon did maintain a theory very like that you mention, sir." "Ah! he did, did he?
It's very much as it is with the talk of the sea growing strange to you from hearing nothing but lubbers who don't know a mizzen-mast from a church-steeple. It was somewhere about twenty years ago last October, if I recollect fair, that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar.
Now, near to the end of the epistle, there came some news of their present actions, and thus we learnt that they in the ship were busy at staying the stump of the mizzen-mast, this being the one to which they proposed to attach the big rope, taking it through a great iron-bound snatch-block, secured to the head of the stump, and then down to the mizzen-capstan, by which, and a strong tackle, they would be able to heave the line so taut as was needful.
The atmosphere was, however, clear; and the wreck could still be distinguished, though much reduced in size. While Adam had his glass turned towards it he observed the mizzen-mast, which had hitherto stood, go by the board, and the instant afterwards the whole of the remaining part of the hull seemed to melt away before the furious seas which broke against it.
Now, right before us, the anchorage was bounded by a plateau from two to three hundred feet high, adjoining on the north the sloping southern shoulder of the Spy-glass, and rising again toward the south into the rough, cliffy eminence called the Mizzen-mast Hill. The top of the plateau was dotted thickly with pine trees of varying height.
The topgallant-sails, which were still set, were in an instant torn into ribbons, the foretopsail was blown out of the bolt ropes, and the mizzen-mast, which had been wounded, was carried over the side, and the prize lay a helpless wreck amid the raging seas which threatened every instant her destruction. We must return to Texford. Julia had kept to her resolution of not going up to London.
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