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There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was still a rare sight in those parts a steamer. She was a side-wheeler, with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast, fore-and-aft on her mizzen.
The control stations were beautifully French and neat, painted yellow, each with its gorgeous bougainvilleas in flower, its square-rigged signal masts, its brightly painted extra buoys standing in a row, its wharf and its impassive Arab fishermen thereon. We reclined in our canvas chairs, had lemon squashes brought to us, and watched the entertainment steadily and slowly unrolled before us.
We had been two weeks at sea, having experienced chiefly calms and light winds, when one morning at daybreak, while on the right of the island of Lombok, the lofty cone of its volcano rising blue and distinct against the sky, a square-rigged vessel was descried in the north-east quarter.
As she drew nearer I was able to make her out better, and from her build she carried two masts and was square-rigged forward and schooner-rigged aft as well as from her tawdry gilt figurehead, concluded she was a hermaphrodite brig of, very possibly, Dutch nationality.
"Is it a cruiser?" sais I; "because if it is, steer boldly for her, and I will go on board of her and show my commission as an officer of our everlastin' nation. Captain," said I, "what is that stranger?" He paused for a moment, shaded his eyes with his hand, and examined her. "A large square-rigged vessel," he said, "under a heavy press of canvas," and resumed his walk on the deck.
The Dido was the first square-rigged vessel that had ever entered those waters. We came to at the junction river which unites the two principal entrances to the Sarawak. In the evening our boats returned on board from their expedition, having reached Sarawak the day previous by the western entrance.
Helm's a-lee. Tacks and sheets. Mainsail haul." And then the fatal words: "That'll do your mainsail; jump for'ard and haul round your foreyards." To stay a square-rigged ship is an affair of knowledge and swift sight: and a man used to the succinct evolutions of a schooner will always tend to be too hasty with a brig. It was so now.
This species of craft is usually, but not necessarily, larger than those that have been described; it is generally built on a larger scale than the schooner, and often approaches in magnitude to the full-sized, three-masted ship. The distinctive features of the brig are, that it has two masts, both of which are square-rigged.
It is a shorter voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or Galveston. This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always been the more perilous and exacting.
All the war-vessels of the little republic were thus fully employed. But, besides this arrangement, Maurice was empowered to lay an embargo under what penalty he chose and during his pleasure on all square-rigged vessels over 300 tons, in order that there might be an additional supply in case of need.
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