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Updated: September 25, 2025
The mizzen-mast lay aft across the cabin skylight, with its standing and running rigging making a tangle on each side of it. The main-mast still stood, but with its top-mast broken off and dangling nearly to the deck. Two of the weather-boats remained fast to the davits, but so smashed that they looked like battered tin wash-basins, and would have floated just about as well.
If you were to put a fore-and-aft rigged mizzen-mast into the after part of a brig, that would convert it into a barque. The term clipper simply denotes that peculiar sharpness of build and trimness of rig which insure the greatest amount of speed, and does not specify any particular class. There are clipper sloops, clipper yachts, clipper ships, etcetera.
The effect of her shot seemed to make the Guerrière reel and tremble as though she had received the shock of an earthquake. Immediately after this, I heard a tremendous crash on deck and was told that the mizzen-mast was shot away. In a few moments afterward, the cock-pit was filled with wounded men.
Master Jacko was introduced to the ship's crew and to his quarters, which consisted of a small box filled with straw, and was lashed near the foot of the mizzen-mast. These introductions having been made, the men who had accompanied their commander on his late excursion into the interior, went forward and regaled their messmates for hours with anecdotes of their travels in the wilds of Africa.
Tell 'em to look sharp on shore, for I'm gettin' used up with all this work." Away went the captain, and in a few minutes back came the lifebuoy. Not a moment too soon. Blackbeard sprang in as the mizzen-mast snapped with a report like a cannon, and went over the side. The next wave broke up the wreck itself.
Sir John Warren immediately gave the signal for a general chase, but a heavy gale set in that evening, during which the Anson carried away her mizzen-mast main-yard and main-topsail-yard. The Hoche, however, was even more unfortunate, for she carried away her main-topmast, and this in its fall brought down the fore and mizzen-topgallant-masts.
Then all the main deck between the poop and the mizzen-mast will be flooded with light, while we shall be in comparative darkness. Of course each morning before daylight we shall lower all this apparatus to the deck, so that the men for'ard will not guess what we have up our sleeve, or, rather, what we have up on the trysail-stays.
Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratified whalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh; also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead was visible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadily out over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of the probable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the 'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whalebone plates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; and after visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boy of fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all the turned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, being evidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of the ship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all the three missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag near to each.
He took an axe and lifted it high in his right hand, while the boat tossed like a nutshell and the noise of the storm deadened all other sounds. "The boat is too heavy," muttered Jacopo to himself, and swinging his axe he cut off the mizzen-mast close to the deck.
As soon as I had seen them into the cabin, I sprang again on deck. The sharp sound of the axe as it struck the mizzen-mast was heard at that moment. The shrouds on either side were cut, and over the mast fell into the foaming water. Still the ship lay as before.
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