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Updated: May 8, 2025
Here he was searched again for jack-knife or brass knuckles, bound with the hambro-line, gagged with a thole-pin, and marched forward, past the prostrate first mate, who lay quiet in the scuppers, and the erect but agonized second mate, gagged and bound to the fife-rail, to the port forecastle, where he was locked in with the Chinese cook, who, similarly treated, had preceded.
One man steered the boat, another in the bow managed the towline, and a third, who walked on land, drove the dogs. We had seven canines three pairs and a leader pulling upon a deerskin towline fastened to a thole-pin. It was the duty of the man in the bow to regulate the towline according to circumstances. The dogs were unaccustomed to their driver, and balky in consequence.
At first we thought he was dead; but a second glance showed us that a gag, made out of a thole-pin and a lump of oakum, had been put into his mouth. On being released it was some time before he could speak.
The mate nodded, and drew about a dozen more yards from the open winder. "That ought to do it," he said. "I'll give the line a twist round that thole-pin, and then we shall hear it rattle if there's a bite and here hi! Bless my soul!" Whizz! whoop! bang! The thole-pin had darted overboard, the winder was snatched from Lynton's hand and struck violently against the steersman's leg.
It was a four-oared curagh, and I was given the last seat so as to leave the stern for the man who was steering with an oar, worked at right angles to the others by an extra thole-pin in the stern gunnel. When we had gone about a hundred yards they ran up a bit of a sail in the bow and the pace became extraordinarily rapid.
They are fastened to the gunwale by short pieces of rope, and work in a moveable iron crutch on an iron thole-pin. Each boat is provided with a set of spare oars.
The long boat, by far the largest and stoutest of the two, was permanently bolted down to the deck, by iron bars attached to its sides. It was almost as much of a fixture as the vessel's keel. It was filled with pigs, fowls, firewood, and coals. Over this the jolly-boat was capsized without a thole-pin in the gunwales; its bottom bleaching and cracking in the sun.
"We don't want to go for to let everybody ashore know we're coming." There was silence then, only broken by the splash of the water from the oars, and a dismal creaking noise of wood upon wood. "Shove a bit o' grease agen that there thole-pin o' yours, Tom Tully. Your oar'll rouse all the smugglers along the coast." "Ar'n't no grease," growled Tom.
Leaning over the side, he slipped the painter from the thole-pin round which it hung, and then shoving with all his might, he sent the skiffs a good way apart at once. "After him, boys!" Yaspard cried; but the boys were not ready.
These oars were forty feet long, and ran in from the thole-pin with a loom six feet long, each manned by four slaves, who were chained to their seat before it, by a running chain made fast by a padlock in amidships. A plank, of two feet wide, ran fore and aft the vessel between the two banks of oars, for the boatswain to apply the lash to those who did not sufficiently exert themselves.
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