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Updated: May 4, 2025
Luckily it turned out that the Elizabeth was on her way from the Indies to England, and had only anchored during the night in the hope of sighting one more prize; so it was by the merest chance that Roger escaped after all. The captain now made sail, and pointed his vessel's bows for home. The voyage lasted just three months, and they met with no single enemy on the whole way.
From conversation he overheard on the seventh evening, he learned that Corfu had been sighted that day. For some hours the vessel's sails had been lowered, and she had remained motionless; but she was now again making for the land, and in the course of another two hours a landing was to be made. The boats had all been got in readiness, and the men were to muster fully armed.
Suddenly he reflected that he had no way of attracting attention, and a wild desire of running back and setting up the longest pole or board that he could find came into his mind; but such was the intensity of his curiosity, and the weight of his suspense, that he could not move from the spot where he was until he had satisfied himself as to the vessel's course.
"I believe he's referring to the crew who deserted the ship and left him behind to his fate, sir," I answered, "for he has spoken of the `cowardly sailors, as he calls them. I think they must have been curs, sir, to have left him to die tied up like that, sir!" "Anything else, eh?" "He also says, `be quick and look below. I suppose he means for us to examine the vessel's hold."
Anon, he gathers up his clams or worms, and his one sun-baked flounder you think he is going home but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid, not kindly nor unkindly feeling but not to have anything to do with the rest of the world.
From the commencement of the voyage Rose had drooped, growing weaker every day, until at last all who looked upon her felt that the home of which she talked so much would never again be gladdened by her presence. Very tenderly Henry Warner nursed her, bearing her often in his arms up on the vessel's deck, where she could breathe the fresh morning air as it came rippling o'er the sea.
But before he had sailed many miles he remembered that he had a duty to perform to the merchants of St Malo who had fitted out his little ship. The course was changed, the vessel's bow turned westward, and after a few days' sail he cast anchor in the black waters at the mouth of the great gorge of the Saguenay.
Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour.
Captain Charlewood, of the Royal Navy, who recently commanded the iron frigate Guadaloupe in the service of Mexico, testified before a Committee of the British Parliament, that "his ship was under fire almost daily for four or five months," that "the damage by shot was considerably less than that usually suffered by a wooden vessel, and that there was nothing like the number of splinters which are generally forced out by a shot sent through a wooden vessel's side"; that "the vessel was hulled once in the midship part at about one thousand yards," and the effect was "that the shot passed through the iron, making a round hole in the iron"; "that at two feet below water another shot passed through the vessel's side and one or two casks of provisions, and that the hole was simply plugged by the engineer at the time."
He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked down to the wharf where the Swordfish was moored. The ship had left the wharf, and was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just reached her, and a slender youth, as he appeared at that distance, climbed, not over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.
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