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Updated: April 30, 2025
Moreover, being discovered on the starboard bow, reaching out from the direction wherein land was known to be, with her yards artfully ill braced, her canvas badly set, her running gear hanging all in bights, and her speed retarded by a topmast studding- sail being dropped overboard and towed from her lee quarter less than that of the veriest Noah's ark of a north-country collier, she was at once set down as a harmless coaster, and no further notice taken of her.
The result was apparent at once. The gap between them became a gulf. The flag flying so proudly on the topmast of the sloop was gone in the dusk. Her spars and sails faded away, she showed only a dim, low hulk on the water from which her guns flashed. The schooner tacked again. A new bank of blackness poured down over the sea, and the sloop was gone.
Archie let it drip from the end of the boat-hook for a minute, and then brought it in. "Morning, Sir Thomas," I said, saluting it as it came on board. "Lovely day for a sail. We've got the new topmast up, but Her Grace had the last of the potted-meat for lunch yesterday." Simpson took his cap and stroked it tenderly. "Thirteen and ninepence in the Buckingham Palace Road," he murmured.
Chips snubbed her with the twenty-five fathom shackle just inside the hawse-pipe, the depth of water alongside being a deep five fathoms, and then the men sprang into the rigging and laid out on the bowsprit to furl the topsails and fore topmast staysail.
Brown, get up the topmast studding-sail! What she can't carry she may drag! The mate looked a moment; but he would let no one be before him in daring. He sprang forward. ``Hurrah, men! rig out the topmast studding-sail boom!
We thought it best to hold on the same course, rather than turn more northerly, which might have brought us to the northwest parts of Great Tartary, and into the Frozen Sea. On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the topmast discovered land.
Stays and braces grew tauter and tauter, studden sail-booms cracked, and the topgallant masts bent like willow wands. "We are going to get it," observed the captain of the top. He was right. Away flew the main-topgallant studden sail; the topmast studden sail followed. At the same moment, the foremost guns with a loud roar sent a couple of shot after the chase.
At length, a shot aimed high by the lugger struck the cutter's topmast. The spar held on for a minute, but a stronger puff of wind filling the sail, with a loud crash it gave way, and down came the gaff-topsail and square-topsail. The mainsail and squaresail still, however, stood. The lugger now came up hand over hand. The two stern chasers were once more fired.
Our skipper was standing just abaft the main-rigging, conning the ship, with one hand on the topmast backstay all ready for a spring, while he signalled the helmsman with the other. Sennitt was forward, also ready for the rush; while Mr Clewline, who with a dozen hands was to remain on board and take care of the ship, was in the waist.
For Mr Murgatroyd was "carrying on" and driving the ship quite as much as was consistent with prudence; the wind, it is true, had moderated slightly from its boisterous character of the previous day, and was now steady; but it was still blowing strong, and had hauled round a point or two until it was square abeam; yet, although the lower yards were braced well forward, the ship was under all three royals, and fore and main-topgallant and topmast studding-sails, with a lower studding-sail upon the foremast!
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