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Of his many schooners, ketches and cutters that nosed about among the coral isles of the South Seas, David Grief loved most the Rattler a yacht-like schooner of ninety tons with so swift a pair of heels that she had made herself famous, in the old days, opium-smuggling from San Diego to Puget Sound, raiding the seal-rookeries of Bering Sea, and running arms in the Far East.
Yacht-like she sat the water all buoyant grace from lofty prow to tapering counter, and to me there was something sublime in the grim and latent power, the strength and beauty of her. "But she's not so very big, is she?" enquired a voice behind me. The Captain stared; the Master Builder smiled. "Fairly!" he nodded. "Why do you ask?"
I went aft, ascended the poop, where, under the awning, gleamed the brasses of the yacht-like fittings, the polished surfaces of the rails, the glass of the skylights.
Accordingly, a model boat, the "Grampus," was designed, the style of which has been pretty generally followed in the fishing fleet. Such a typical craft is a schooner of about eighty tons, clean-cut about the bows, and with a long overhang at the stern that would give her a rakish, yacht-like air, except for the evidences of her trade, with which her deck is piled.
Pierre that the "Sea Bee" drifted slowly into the harbour of Port aux Basques, where the yacht-like steamer "Bruce" lay beside its single wharf. She had just completed her six-hour run across Cabot Strait, from North Sidney, eighty-five miles away, and close at hand stood the narrow-gauge train that was to carry her passengers and mails to St. Johns.
It was a power boat and was running parallel with the coast in a southeasterly direction and inshore of the anchorage of the Sue Bridger. She was about forty feet long and was showing some speed; but her hull looked battered, and there was nothing natty or yacht-like about her. "No pleasure craft, that," ventured Torry, as Phil trained his glasses on her. "She's too slouchy."
In those days did a German trading-vessel in the Islands sight a white-painted brig with yacht-like lines and carrying Cunningham's patent topsails, the Teutonic skipper cracked on all his ship could stagger under, and thanked heaven when he saw the stranger hull-down; for Bully, with his fidus achates, the almost equally notorious Captain Ben Peese, had a penchant for boarding Dutchmen and asking for a look at their chronometers, and in his absent-minded way, taking these latter away with him.
And when I had got thus far with my work and inspected the result from various view-points, I was as much amazed at my own audacity in attempting so ambitious an undertaking as I was gratified at the appearance which it presented; for I saw before me the outline of a very shapely, yacht-like little ship that, if I knew anything of such matters, promised to be fast, weatherly, and a very fine sea-boat, quite capable of taking care of herself when hove-to, even in a heavy gale of wind.
The Montauk was one of the noblest of those surpassingly beautiful and yacht-like ships that now ply between the two hemispheres in such numbers, and which in luxury and the fitting conveniences seem to vie with each other for the mastery.
There was wild work for'ard on her, and in a quarter of an hour the house went clear, but it had taken the Papara's foremast and bowsprit with it. Inshore, on their port bow, lay the Tahaa, slim and yacht-like, but excessively oversparred. Her anchors still held, but her captain, finding no abatement in the wind, proceeded to reduce windage by chopping down his masts.
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