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Updated: June 1, 2025
The oars were allowed to swing from the tholes, and the boat was left to glide slowly downwards, while in their smart orderly way her crew prepared for action. "You will load too, gentlemen with ball. Now, doctor, will you take command and lead us?" "What to do?" asked the doctor. "Why, to take our schooner again, sir. She's in the hands of an enemy."
A boat upon the open sea no land in sight! It is an open boat, the size and form showing it to be the pinnace of a merchant-ship. It is a tropical sea, with a fiery sun overhead, slowly coursing through a sky of brilliant azure. The boat has neither sail nor mast. There are oars, but no one is using them. They lie athwart the tholes, their blades dipping in the water, with no hand upon the grasp.
Then the light grew rich and deep, and the sea swallows shot from the misty heights, like arrows, into the calm purple air below, and skimmed and wheeled, and rose again, startled by the splash of the oars and the dull knock of them as they swung in the tholes.
An hour later, with twenty sweeps swinging rhythmically in the tholes, and a fair southwesterly breeze, the sharp-cut boat was far out in the English Channel, and before night, the wind holding fair and freshening, the master dropped anchor almost under the shadow of the Count of Flanders' castle at Calais.
When the turtles had been hauled aboard, their flesh was salted with the brine taken from the natural salt-pans to be found among the islands. When a manatee was killed, the hide was stripped away, and hung to dry. It was then cut into thongs, and put to various uses. The buccaneers made grummets, or rings, of it, for use in their row boats instead of tholes or rowlocks.
Clump, sitting bent over the fire to get light for his work, was cutting some tholes for the boat with his knife. "Hi," he said, as he saw us enter, "dat's good fur sore eyes." And Juno, taking the pipe from her mouth, greeted us with a long whiff of smoke, and "I'se glad you'se cum getten dark an glum 'ere, only ole Clump an me. What do yun Massas shoot?"
"Just do you go and turn in, and I will moor the boat and make a new set of `tholes' for you." Again Michael begged that his friend would not trouble himself, adding "If you have brought the shells for Nelly and will leave them with me, I will give them to her when she comes home." Nothing he could say, however, would induce Eban to go away.
Fortunately we pulled with tholes and pins, or the gunwale and planks of the boat would have been wrenched off, and we should have foundered.
Fifteen minutes later, the little boat, loaded down to her gunwales, set out for the tug. Four oarsmen rowed, one man to the oar. The slow clacking of shafts in tholes echoed sharply from the huge walls of the dock as the dinghy drew away through the burning sunshine.
He produced the canvas and the rope-yarn from his pockets, and the boys watched his quick, workmanlike movements without understanding what he was doing. When he began to pull again the oars made no noise against the tholes, and he dipped the blades gently into the water, as he pulled past the tower into the sheltered bay beyond.
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