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Updated: May 14, 2025
The cries of herons, loons, and river-hens rose with strange distinctness, so delicate was the atmosphere, and the blue of the sky was exquisite. As they paddled slowly along this lake, keeping time to their songs with the paddles, there suddenly grew out of the distance a great flotilla of canoes with tall prows, and behind them a range of islands which they had not before seen.
The river is all alive with human forms, and airy paddles and the prows of tilting boats. The plateau swarms. It is covered with waving blankets and dancing plumes. All is gayety and mirth. There is another roll of drums, and then silence. The circling blankets and plumes become motionless. The chief of the Cascades is coming, and with him is Benjamin and his young bride, and Gretchen.
"I'll race you on even terms. Go ahead!" Both lads adjusted their timers to get more speed. The water began to curl away from the sharp prows, the motors exploded faster and faster. The race was on between the ARROW and the RED STREAK. Glancing with critical eyes at the craft of his rival, Tom saw that Andy Foger had a very fine boat.
"I say, we seem to be leaving the canoes down the river well behind, but those up stream are bearing down upon us fast." "Then," said the captain, "they'd better look out, gentlemen, and keep out of our way, for I mean to rush right upon them full sail. The prows of these boats are pretty sharp, and their dug-outs don't take much to send them to the bottom.
Dreaded as merciless pirates and unflinching fanatics, they scattered everywhere terror, ruin, and death, sailing in their light proas up the narrow channels and animated with implacable hatred for those conquering invaders, to whom they never gave quarter and from whom they never expected it; constantly beaten in pitched battle, they as constantly took again to the sea, eluding pursuit of the heavy Spanish vessels, taking refuge in bays and creeks where no one could follow them, pillaging isolated ships, surprising the villages, massacring the old men, leading away the women and the adults into slavery, pushing the audacious prows of their skiffs even up to within three hundred miles of Manila, and seizing every year nearly four thousand captives.
The little ships, the great ships, the fisherman's sloop, the king's corvette, and the merchantman, all lay anchored in the basin and harbor, their prows boring into the gale, their crude hulls rising and falling, tossing and plunging, tugging like living things at their hempen cables. The snow fell upon them, changing them into phantoms, all seemingly eager to join in the mad revel of the storm.
The water was smooth and beautifully blue, while the rising sun tipped the topmost heights of the lofty hills, which rose, as it were, out of the ocean, feathered almost from their summits to the water's edge with graceful trees. There lay the brig, while the prows were clustered like so many beasts of prey around their quarry. The pirates seemed in no way alarmed at our approach.
The last engagement was at Antium, an ancient city on a promontory below Ostia, which, having a little navy, had interfered with the Roman commerce. The prows of the vessels of Antium were set up in the Roman forum as an ornament to the suggestum, or stage from which orators addressed the people. This was called the rostra afterward.
Some pulled spasmodically on the very long limber oars; others squatted doing nothing; some, huddled shapelessly underneath white cloths that completely covered them, slept soundly in the bottom. We took these for merchandise until one of them suddenly threw aside his covering and sat up. Others, again, poised in proud and graceful attitudes on the extreme prows of their bobbing craft.
Matelieff, with three ships and a cutter, now sailed for China, but lost his time in endeavouring to open trade with the Celestial empire. The dilatory mandarins drove him at last out of all patience, and, on turning his prows once more southward, he had nearly brought his long expedition to a disastrous termination.
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