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Updated: June 27, 2025
Still advancing up the creek, we gradually opened the vista of the reach beyond that in which the canoe had a few minutes previously vanished and at length, when only a short half-mile intervened between us and the beach which projected boldly nearly half-way across the channel the main-mast of a schooner crept into view beyond the concealment of the hitherto intervening bush and trees; and bringing our glasses to bear upon her, we detected signs of great bustle and confusion on board her, and made out that her crew were busily engaged in tricing up boarding nettings, and otherwise making preparations for her defence.
It was just the tricing up of those nettings that saved us; but for them the schooner's decks would have been overrun, and we should have been massacred in a moment.
Her crew were tricing up the boarding-netting, dragging round the starboard guns, knocking new portholes for them, and making every preparation for a desperate resistance. In the thick of it all a huge man, bearded to the eyes, with a red nightcap upon his head, was straining and stooping and hauling.
Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all the air. The whale was a sperm-whale, and fully twice the length of the "Bertha Millner." The work of tricing him up occupied the beach-combers throughout the entire day.
As for me, I was left dangling by one hand at the bare end of the severed tricing line, but within easy reach of the starboard main-topsail sheet, which I promptly grasped and began to lower myself hand over hand down to the deck.
"She's started something below, what with all that lifting and dancing and tricing up." Wilbur ran back to the quarterdeck. "This is a bad fix," he said to Moran. "Those chaps are coming aboard again. They're on to something, and, of course, at just this moment she begins to leak." "They are after that ambergris," said Moran between her teeth. "Smelled it, of course the swine!" "Ambergris?"
Led by True Blue, the crew gave a loud cheer as they dashed on under her counter, and then, pushing round to her quarter, hooked on. In a moment, cutting the tricing lines of her boarding nettings, they sprang up her side and threw themselves on the deck. They were received with a shower of musket and pistol bullets, and the points of a row of pikes.
"Those beach-combers are right on to the game, I'm afraid," said Wilbur. "Look, they're watching us. This stuff would smell across the ocean." "Rot the beach-combers! There's a bit of wind, thank God, and we can do four knots to their one, just let us get clear once." Moran dragged the hammock back into the cabin, and, returning upon deck, helped Wilbur to cut away the last tricing tackle.
"Just taking in provisions in case I have to spend the week-end on a raft. What's your action station?" "Fore-top," was the reply. "Taking notes of the action. Now, have I got everything? Thermos flask watch note-book glasses right! En avant, mon brave!" Thorogood reached the 6-inch battery breathless, and found the guns' crews busy tricing up their mess-tables overhead.
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