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In one of the caves, called Spritsail Tor, bones of the elephants above named were observed, with a great many other quadrupeds of Recent and extinct species.
At length, however, as the sun dipped behind the wooded slopes across the water toward Millbrook, a ship's spritsail and sprit topsail, with a long pennon streaming from the head of the mast which supported the latter, crept slowly into view beyond Devil's Point, to the accompaniment of a general shout of "There a be!" from the waiting crowd, and a minute later the entire ship stood revealed, heading up the Pool under all sail, to the impulse of the dying breeze which was by this time so faint that the white canvas of the approaching craft scarcely strained at all upon its sheets and yards.
There were faces of every form, if not of colour, for all were black as jet; their faces disfigured in every variety of manner, some with lip-rings, others with rings in their noses, and some with pieces of bone stuck spritsail fashion through the cartilage. Some, instead of bone, wore brass-headed nails, while many had pieces of bone through their ears.
Finding that the ship continued to steer herself very well, and the better for the spritsail, I thought I would get the body of the old Frenchman overboard and so obtain a clear hold for myself so far as corpses went. I carried the lanthorn into the forecastle, but when I pulled the hammock off him I confess it was not without a stupid fear that I should find him alive.
As the spritsail was taken in and the boat headed on to the beach, he was aware of a distinct hurt at sight of Joan at the steering-oar, standing erect and swaying her strength to it as she resisted the pressures that tended to throw the craft broadside in the surf. Her Tahitians leaped out and rushed the boat high up the beach, and she led her bizarre following through the gate of the compound.
As the brig came more upon the wind, she felt it more, and we doused the skysails, but kept the weather studding-sails on her, bracing the yards forward, so that the swinging-boom nearly touched the spritsail yard. She now lay over to it, the wind was freshening, and the captain was evidently ``dragging on to her. His brother and Mr.
She had arrived the night before, after dark, and we were preparing to pay our first visit ashore. Early in the morning I had noticed a tiny outrigger canoe, with an impossible spritsail, skimming the surface of the lagoon. The canoe itself was coffin- shaped, a mere dugout, fourteen feet long, a scant twelve inches wide, and maybe twenty-four inches deep.
The only way now was to let everything stand, and if the gale went down, well and good; if not, something must go the weakest stick or rope first and then we could get it in. For more than an hour she was driven on at such a rate that she seemed actually to crowd the sea into a heap before her; and the water poured over the spritsail yard as it would over a dam.
The bowsprit staved very much, and was to appearance almost as a fourth mast: the more so, as she carried a square spritsail and sprit-topsail. On her quarter-deck and poop-bulwarks were fixed in sockets implements of warfare now long in disuse, but what were then known by the names of cohorns and patteraroes; they turned round on a swivel, and were pointed by an iron handle fixed to the breech.
Without waiting any longer he drove the Japanese guard from the ship, bent the foresail and spritsail, loaded the artillery, and, with weapons in hand, one morning set the ship in readiness to weigh anchor.
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