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Updated: June 13, 2025
The square canvas was now thrown flat aback and the ship soon gathered stern-way, when, by a judicious and skilful manipulation of the helm and braces, a stern-board was made and the vessel backed into the indentation and to its farthest extremity, a distance of about two cables'-lengths.
These pulks are shaped very much like a canoe; they are about five feet long, one foot deep, and eighteen inches wide, with a sharp bow and a square stern. You sit upright against the stern-board, with your legs stretched out in the bottom.
It was a somewhat difficult matter to get so big a ship under way in the rather thickly crowded anchorage, and we were obliged at the outset to make a rather long and complicated stern-board, which entailed two or three very narrow shaves of fouling one or another of the craft that were in our way.
"`Ho! ho! says I to myself, `if you goes to make a stern-board, old gal, I'll rake you before you shows your broadside to me again; so on that I whips out my long knife, which I had tucked away in my belt, with a lanyard round my neck, and drove it with all my force right into her. The more she backed, and the louder she growled, the harder and faster I drove in the knife.
He cast over the side a rope-ladder, such as is in common use on board ships, and we climbed to the quarterdeck, over the stern-board of which, and covering the companion-hatch, there had been built a roof, or open cabin, making that part of the brig answer the same purposes as the porch of a house.
Together we balanced it on the gunwale, and with the help of the stern-board tilted it over. It dropped, into fifteen fathoms of water.
Luckily for him, the mate was ready to fire his pistol again. The ball struck its lower jaw and broke it. It then made a stern-board, but before it could reach the bows the boatswain gave it a stroke with the axe which nearly gullyteened it; you know, shipmates, what that is. Why, mayhap you don’t; so I’ll tell you. It’s a kind of gallows that cuts off Frenchmen’s heads.
Hitherto the ship had been kept in her first position by backing and filling the mizen-topsail, but now she came to, and eventually came round: but Captain Saumarez, whose presence of mind never forsook him, brailed up the mizen, and, by keeping all the square-sails aback, gave the ship a stern-board; at the same time, by keeping the helm up, she wore round on her heel, obtaining a position under the stern and on the starboard quarter, while the enemy was lying with his yards square and totally unmanageable.
Then his fellows, seeing him, as they supposed, dead, turned to drinking. The lugger, left to herself, took charge, and swung round head to wind. Since then she had drifted, sometimes making a stern-board, sometimes going ahead a little, but nearly always drifting slowly shoreward, flogging her gear, making a great clatter of blocks.
Sure enough, on the far side of Dean Pont they found the sloop's mainmast washing about with half a dozen men lashed to it, men in red jackets, every mother's son drowned and staring; and a little further on, just under the Dean, three or four bodies cast up on the shore, one of them a small drummer-boy, side-drum and all; and near by part of a ship's gig, with 'H.M.S. Primrose' cut on the stern-board.
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