Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
The captain himself is in the stern-sheets, tiller-lines in hand. Mrs Gancy and her daughter crouch beside him, while the others are at the oars, in which occupation Ned and Chester occasionally pause to bale out, as showers of spray keep breaking over the boat, threatening to swamp it. What point shall they steer for? This is a question that no one asks, nor thinks of asking as yet.
It may seem strange that the youthful pair in the stern-sheets, still but tender children, and the girl more especially, should have withstood the terrible suffering beyond a period possible to many strong men, tough sailors every one of them.
Do," said a voice, blank and muffled out of the fog. Not one of the many attentive listeners understood what the words meant; and then Brown and his men in their boat floated away, fading spectrally without the slightest sound. 'Thus Brown, invisible in the mist, goes out of Patusan elbow to elbow with Cornelius in the stern-sheets of the long-boat.
In due time a boat full of men was swung down from the davits of the cruiser, the oars dipped, and she came skimming along with a steady pull, and every stroke pulled clean and with hardly a splash, till she came alongside, when, to the delight of Rodd, there in the stern-sheets were the same officer and middy who had overhauled them off the African coast.
The Hispaniola, in that unbroken mirror, was exactly portrayed from the truck to the water-line, the Jolly Roger hanging from her peak. Alongside lay one of the gigs, Silver in the stern-sheets him I could always recognize while a couple of men were leaning over the stern bulwarks, one of them with a red cap the very rogue that I had seen some hours before stride-legs upon the palisade.
The united strength of her crew, and some twenty other men, quickly launched her on the water of the comparatively sheltered bay. "Remember!" cried the captain, standing up in the stern-sheets, and looking back at Tom. "Shove off, lads! Give way! We shall be wanted out there before long." Bravely the men bent to their oars.
She was a large, well-shaped craft, propelled by twenty-four paddles, and she dashed ahead of us as if we had been at anchor, her occupants and especially four individuals who sat in the stern-sheets, or at all events where the stern-sheets ought to be, and who, from their display of feathers, bead necklaces, and leopard-skin robes, must have been very bigwigs indeed looking straight ahead of them and vouchsafing not the faintest indication that they were conscious of our presence.
As the leading boat drew nearer to the side, so that Marcy could obtain a fairer view of the man who sat in the stern-sheets talking to the coxswain, he uttered a cry of surprise and alarm, and almost let his glass fall from his hand. The man was Aleck Webster. Marcy Gray waited until the boat drew a little nearer, and then looked again. There could be no mistake about it.
This produced the desired effect. The strange vessel backed her top-sails and hove-to, while we ranged up and lay-to about a hundred yards off. "Lower the boat," cried the captain. In a second the boat was lowered and manned by a part of the crew, who were all armed with cutlasses and pistols. As the captain passed me to get into it, he said, "Jump into the stern-sheets, Ralph; I may want you."
The sailors, with their cutlasses belted round their waists, and a pistol stuck in their girdles, or in a becket at the side of the boat, ready to their hands the marines, in proportion to the number which each boat could carry, sitting in the stern-sheets, with their muskets between their legs, and their well pipeclayed belts for bayonet and cartouch-box crossed over their old jackets, half dirt, half finery all was ready for shoving off, when Captain M desired the officers whom he had appointed to the expedition to step down into his cabin.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking