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Each climb was punctuated at the top by a gallon or so of water slopped into the dory from the crest of the wave. These influxes became so frequent that he was obliged to bail very often. Consequently he unshipped one oar and, crawling to the stern, shipped the other in the notch of the sternboard. Here he sculled with one hand so as to keep the dory's head to the wind, and bailed with the other.
The order came too soon; the topsails set flat aback; the ship was in irons. Even yet, had the helm been reversed, they might have saved her. But to think of a sternboard at all, far more to think of profiting by one, were foreign to the schooner-sailor's mind.
And yet I saw too far, for in the mist to which we were making a sternboard, I saw a white line like a fringe or valance to the sea; and then I looked to starboard, and there was the same white fringe, and then to larboard, and the white fringe was there too. Only those who know the sea know how terrible were Elzevir's words uttered in such a place.
"Now that's a clever old man," said the boatswain's mate next day to me, approvingly, of the captain; "boxing her off that way, with all that wind and blackness, was handsomely done." After this we settled down to a two days' pampero, with a huge but regular sea. Whether the Congress's helm on this interesting occasion was shifted for sternboard I never inquired.
Mayhap it runs strong through this race betwixt the shoal and the beach with a slant that's bad for us." "I noted it," glumly agreed Jack. "The jolly-boat passed too far away to please me. And this landward breeze is driving us to sea." "No sense in breaking our backs at these oars," grumbled Joe. "We go ahead like a crab, with a sternboard. Think ye we can swing the raft to fetch the ship?"
The gale showed no sign of abatement; the fleet was scattered; no glimpse of the sun was visible at any time; and the compass was somewhere at the bottom of the sea. "We may be making a bit of headway no'th, or a bit of leeway west," said Weeks, "or we may be doing a sternboard. All that I'm sure of is that you and me are one day going to open Gorleston Harbour.
Sally had paid him to put in a couple of new strakes and plane out a brand-new set of oars in place of the old ashen ones, and had painted a new name beneath the old one on the sternboard, so that now she was the Indefatigable Woman for all the world to see. And that very evening Sally and five of her mates paddled her past the Quay on a trial spin, under the eyes of the whole town.
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