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Updated: June 9, 2025
The harbor or clock where those landed who crossed from eastern Thebes was crowded with barks and boats waiting to return. The crews of rowers and steersmen who were attached to priestly brotherhoods or noble houses, were enjoying a rest till the parties they had brought across the Nile drew towards them again in long processions.
This great lading they annually carry between the depôts and the posts, in the interior; and it rarely happens that any accidents occur, if they be managed by experienced bowmen and steersmen, on whose skill the safety of the canoe entirely depends in the rapids and difficult places.
Here Bes was waiting, also his beautiful wife who, although she seemed sad at leaving Egypt, smiled a greeting to us while the steersmen and rowers of the boat, tall Ethiopians every one of them, rose and gave me a General's salute. Then, as the wind served, we hoisted the sail and glided away up Nile, till presently the temples and palm-groves of Memphis were lost to sight.
All the party were now standing up in the sternsheets of the bateau to look at the people on the raft, who amounted to about fifty or sixty men now running over the top to one side, and dragging at the sweeps, which required the joint power of seven or eight men to each of them now passing again over to the opposite sweeps, as directed by the steersmen.
They fought all day; they weened that their lord there lay, and were near them at their great need. Then bent he the way that toward Hampton lay; and bent toward the haven wickedest of men and took all the ships that there good were, and all the steersmen, to the need of the ships; and proceeded into Cornwall -wickedest of kings in those days!
Their course, however, was irregular, and destitute of steersmen they arrived singly and separately at the floating works, where they continued hanging or were dashed off sidewise on the shore. The foremost powder-ships, which were intended to set fire to the floating works, were cast, by the force of a squall which arose at that instant, on the Flemish coast.
On this officer's return, he informed me he had approached within bow-shot of the vessel, which proved to be a gigantic double canoe, which he conceives must have measured fifty or sixty feet long, kept apart and together by a platform from fifteen to twenty feet broad, which extended nearly the whole length of the canoes, the after-end being square with the sterns of the boats; six or eight feet of this was left clear for the three steersmen, who guided the vessel with three long paddles over the stern.
He straightened himself and glanced at the sailor inside the wheel-house, whose attention was given instantly to the fact that the vessel's head had fallen away a full point or more from South 15 West owing to the easterly set of a strong tide. Vessels' heads are apt to turn when steersmen do not attend to their business.
The bowmen and steersmen were to receive one thousand six hundred livres Halifax per annum, and the middle men one thousand two hundred, exclusive of their necessary equipments; and they stipulated that their wages should be continued until their arrival in Montreal, or their rejoining the service of their present employers. I delivered to Mr.
The paddles were adorned with gaudy woollen streamers. New leggings, of holiday pattern, were intermittently visible on the bowsmen and steersmen as they half rose to give added force to their efforts. At first the men sang their canoe songs, but as the swift rush of the birch-barks brought them almost to their journey's end, they burst into wild shrieks and whoops of delight.
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