United States or South Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On it swept toward the felucca, which had now slewed so that she faced the coming swell nearly stem-on, the water in her meanwhile rushing forward as she sank down into the trough until her stem-head was completely buried.
And from the circumstance that all canvas, except the close-reefed topsails, was furled, Mildmay expressed the opinion that she had struck during heavy weather, and doubtless at night, for it was difficult to understand how a ship could have come stem-on upon the reef during the hours of daylight, on a coast where fog is practically unknown.
There was nothing to be done, no means of escape; for the walls of white water had seemed to leap at us out of the darkness so suddenly that they were no sooner seen than we were upon them; and the only choice left us was whether we would plunge into them stem-on, or be hove in among them broadside-on, as had been the case of the strange ship.
We were heading straight out from the land, and sailing so close to the wind that we were taking the seas nearly stem-on; and I frankly confess that my heart was, metaphorically speaking, in my mouth for the greatest part of that night, while watching the little craft rush bodily into the steep slope of wave after wave, and felt her quiver like a frightened thing as they swept hissing and seething over our heads.
No sooner was the Mohawk's anchor down and the craft riding stem-on to the current than the crew proceeded to launch the two canoes overboard, when proof of their extreme lightness became manifest in the fact that it needed the strength of only ten men to lift each of them and heave them bodily over the rail, after which they were passed astern and secured by a painter.
But alas I even that was not to be; for we had scarcely got the wreckage of the mainmast cut adrift from its lashings, and were busily engaged in arranging it, with the topmast and the mainboom, in the form of a triangle as a base upon which to construct a platform, when it happened that the schooner, having just surmounted a sea, got pinned down by the head, in consequence of all the water in her rushing forward as she settled down, stem-on, into the succeeding trough.
She was coming very nearly stem-on to us, and I could not therefore see her run, but I had no doubt that it was as perfectly shaped as were her bows, for I estimated her speed at fully eight knots, and for a vessel to travel at that rate in such a breeze she must of necessity have possessed absolute perfection of form.
It now also became apparent that some means had been resorted to for the purpose of keeping her broadside presented to us and her hull interposed between us and the pirate vessel, and that these means had now been abandoned as of no further avail; for within the next ten minutes she swung stem-on to us, and we saw that there was indeed another craft alongside her a slashing big topsail schooner, immensely beamy, with all her canvas clewed up and furled, and her decks cumbered with bales and packages of all sizes and descriptions, which were being hoisted out of the big ship's hold and lowered over the side with feverish activity.
We had not pulled more than a dozen strokes before there was a violent concussion, as though we had run stem-on upon a sandbank, the schooner's sides burst apart, the flaming planks of the deck, with its fittings, the guns, and everything else upon it, soared into the air in the midst of a blinding sheet of flame, and then came the dull, heavy roar of the explosion, and black darkness.
He had not long to wait. Almost before he had found time to remove his hat and wipe the perspiration from his brow a shout came echoing up the staircase shaft from the bottom of the ship, announcing the fact that the trap-door was securely closed; and Sir Reginald instantly raised the ship from the ground, sending the engines gently ahead at the same moment, and putting the helm hard over so as to bring the Flying Fish stem-on to the direction from which he expected the hurricane.
Word Of The Day