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Updated: June 12, 2025
The first definite idea to take possession of George Leicester's mind, after he had fully realised the calamity of his capture, was escape. Whilst chained immovable to a ring-bolt on his own vessel's deck, this was clearly a simple impossibility; and as he now glanced round the enclosure in which he found himself, he recognised the fact that it was still equally so.
Then the lads tailed on to the breeching hawsers, which held the carriage from sliding on its iron rollers, and eased the strain as well as they could. The ponderous mass was almost free to plunge across the deck. Joe sweated and braced his feet against a ring-bolt while Jack Cockrell found a cleat.
For a few moments there was the silence of utter astonishment, and then the man who had pursued the boys down the river began to take advantage of the general excitement by keeping hold of the side of the gig and beginning to draw it away; but Bob set up such a howl of dismay that it drew Peter's attention, and he too seized the boat from the other end, caught out the chain, and hooked it on to a ring-bolt of the big boat in which he sat.
Left alone now, Mr Gregory waited patiently till the rope came down again, when he caught it and secured it round his waist, after which he went to the bows of the gig, took the painter, and by pressing the stern of the ship managed to draw the prow close up to the hull, and then after a little search he discovered a ring-bolt upon the rudder-post, to which he drew the boat, running the painter right through and making it fast, so that the little vessel was well out of sight, unless seen by the crews of one of the praus.
Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
Sunshine Bill had been holding on to a ring-bolt in the deck, and when the ship broke up, he found himself still doing so, and floating on a portion of it which had been sent a considerable distance from the reef. He looked around him to see if any of his shipmates had also escaped immediate destruction.
The one at the helm was evidently an officer, for neither of the others made a move until he gave the order: "Throw that line ashore!" Goeltz seized it and made fast to a ring-bolt, and then only at another command did the two stand up. We seized their hands and pulled them up on the wall.
I therefore turned my attention to her in the first instance, causing her to be brought alongside the longboat and her painter to be made fast to the ring-bolt in the stern of the latter, thus reversing the original arrangement; my intention being that, in the event of bad weather, the longboat should tow the gig.
A piece of the planking, as it washed by, struck Adair on the leg, and knocking him down, the sea would have swept him overboard had not Murray seized him by the arm, when Mr Gale coming to his assistance they carried him forward. He was too much hurt to move, and they were afraid his leg was broken. Murray sat with him on the deck, holding on by a ring-bolt and supporting him in his lap.
He leaped out, made the boat fast, and then, coming back, was about to carry the boy ashore; but my father had forestalled him, and stepped out with the boy in his arms, laying him gently down on the grass, and then looking wonderingly at Morgan, who had followed, and knelt down to pass a rope through the shackle and make it fast to a ring-bolt used for mooring the boat, and driven into one of the tree-trunks close to the water.
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