United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse. Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell.
For this purpose he lightened his vessel, thrust her into some narrow inlet where she would be left high and dry at low water, fastened blocks and tackles to her masts to pull her over on to her bilge, and then scraped her thoroughly from rudder-post to cut-water.
"The rudder and rudder-post have both been carried away. What a blessing that they did not go before we got her about; if they had, nothing could have saved us." "True for you, sir," responded Ben in acquiescence; while the Norwegian nodded his head and said, "Ja! ja!"
In another moment the two sailors had shoved off from the ship's side. As they did so, the stern of the Kangaroo lifted right out of the water so that they could see under her rudder-post. Just then, too, with a yell of terror, Mr.
The helmsman stood in a sheltered place which rose only two feet above the deck. The captain stood by the companion-way, looking south at the storm; the mate was near the capstan, and all were intent and absorbed in their expectation of a sudden squall. Close by the rudder-post stood Cigole, looking with all the rest at the gathering storm.
The doors of the latter, however, were closed so that no light came through the slanting windows that opened out on either side of the rudder-post, above which is usually fitted what is called the stern gallery on board of an East Indiaman or man-of-war.
Simultaneously the top of the rudder-post, a bar of iron ten inches in diameter, was suddenly wrenched off, and her steering gear being also carried away, she broached to and lay like a huge log in the trough of the sea.
That dark and silent hull at which he stared seemed to house untold possibilities of evil. Yet Blake remembered that it also housed Binhart. And with that thought in his mind he no longer cared to hesitate. He rowed in under the shadowy counter, bumping about the rudder-post. Then he worked his way forward, feeling quietly along her side-plates, foot by foot.
Sometimes, indeed, the sea had swept clean over them, and had it not been that they had lashed themselves with ropes, they must have been swept away. Every great wave had swept away some plank or beam of the wreck, and when they left it, scarce a fragment of the deck remained attached to the rudder-post.
Then suddenly it seemed as though the end had come, for a particularly well-aimed shell came hurtling into the Covadonga, close to her rudder-post, almost entirely destroying the rudder, and smashing one of the blades clean off the propeller. As a consequence, her speed immediately dropped to about five knots, and Condell ground his teeth with rage.
Word Of The Day