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It held large supplies of stores, and was amply furnished with arquebuses, sakers, and murtherers, a species of naval ordnance which probably did not belie its name. It also boasted, we are told, of two drums for training-days, and no fewer than fifteen hautboys and soft-voiced recorders all which suggests a mediaeval castle, or a grim fortress in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
After tea Miss Sakers and Eliza both did needlework. Miss Sakers was doing a thing in crewels. I could not see what Eliza was doing. She kept it hidden, almost under the table. To prevent the conversation from flagging, I said, "Eliza, dear, what are you making?" She frowned hard at me, shook her head slightly, and asked Miss Sakers about the special preacher for Epiphany Sunday.
"We never call on anybody, and nobody ever calls on us." "Is Miss Sakers nobody?" "Well, she's never left a card here, and she really is a lady by birth, and can prove it. She just asks the girl to say she's been, and it's nothing of importance, when she doesn't find me in. If she can do without cards, we can. You'd much better go by her."
She measured somewhat under 400 tons, and mounted 60 guns, consisting of 18 light demi-culverins or short 9-pounders on the main-deck, 6 light sakers on the quarter-deck, and 2 mignons on the after-raised deck, which we should now call the poop.
Then if the salvages approach by land, from yon fair hill which Warren advises, our heavier guns will meet them half way, and our smaller metal mow them down at close quarters. We are well set forth in gun-metal, Governor, for I saw to it myself; not only minions, but sakers and falcons and bases, not to mention each man's piece, which I fain would have had all snaphances like mine own.
"Then why do you go on reading it to yourself?" "Strictly speaking, I am not reading it. I am glancing at it." When Eliza got up to go to bed, an hour afterward, she asked me if I was still glancing. I kept my temper. "Try not to be so infernally unreasonable," I said. "If Miss Sakers lends us a book, it is discourteous not to look at it."
Our modern sailor in the navy, however, would be hopelessly lost in trying to follow directions like the following: Make ready your cannons, middle culverins, bastard culverins, falcons, sakers, slings, headsticks, murderers, passevolants, bazzils, dogges, crook arquebusses, calivers, and hail shot! 'A sail! 'How bears she? To-windward or lee-ward? Set him by the compass!
For artillery, the top of the Tower was mounted with some antiquated wall-pieces, and small cannons, which bore the old-fashioned names of culverins, sakers, demi-sakers, falcons, and falconets.
While I was in the middle of it, Miss Sakers and Eliza came back, and Miss Sakers said good-bye to me very coldly. I offered to raise my bazaar donation to ten shillings, but she did not seem to have heard me. "How could you say that?" said Eliza, when Miss Sakers had gone. "It was most tactless and not very nice." "I thought you were doing something for the bazaar. What were you making, then?"
Besides harquebuses for the soldiers, there were many kinds of cannon with strange names, such as culverins, falconets, sakers, serpentines, and rabinets. Four of the cannon were large enough to shoot a cannon-ball eight inches in diameter. But it was on the skill and courage of her men rather than upon the size of her ships that England relied for victory.
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