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Updated: June 8, 2025
And then surely the grinding of an oar, as it wrought upon the gunwale against an ill-fitted thole-pin out there by the Quette d'Amont! His eyes and ears strained into the darkness till they felt like cracking. And the muffled growl of voices! His heart thumped so, they might have heard it. He must wait till he was sure they meant to come in. But they must not come too close.
He was not long gone, but when he came down again to the boat his preparations for crossing took up an unconscionable time. First the boat must be baled, it seemed, and then a thole-pin was to find; when launched the craft must tangle her bow unaccountably and awkwardly in the weeds. And a curt man was Mungo, though his salute for Count Victor had lost none of its formality.
He writes to Burr, dated "Elizabethtown, August 9th, 1774. "I received yours by Mr. Beach, dated Sunday. Last Saturday I went a crabbing. Being in want of a thole-pin, I substituted a large jackknife in its stead, with the blade open and sticking up.
So, with a dull plunge, the trawl was "shot," the old sailor and Mr Strong quickly pitching over the side, after it, the bunchy folds of the net; when the guy-rope fastened to the bridle of the beam was secured to the bowsprit-bitts and then again to a thole-pin aft, so as to prevent its getting under the keel.
At last, nearly an hour after starting, the boys made out a great deserted tower just ahead. Then Antonino stopped pulling, unshipped his oars one after the other and muffled them just where the strap works on the thole-pin, by binding bits of sailcloth round them.
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.
He had turned to me and was about to speak when a faint crack, like the breaking of a thole-pin, was heard, the sound being accompanied by a very distinct luminous splash of the water. "Ha!" exclaimed Courtenay, "there is a boat over there at no great distance from us!" and at the same moment Fidd came barefooted and noiselessly to my side with the question: "Did ye see and hear that, sir?"
He writes to Burr, dated "Elizabethtown, August 9th, 1774. "I received yours by Mr. Beach, dated Sunday. Last Saturday I went a crabbing. Being in want of a thole-pin, I substituted a large jackknife in its stead, with the blade open and sticking up.
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