Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
When the British commander-in-chief heard of it he was furious, and he wrote to Whipple. "Sir," he said, "you, Abraham Whipple, on the 10th of June, 1772, burned his Majesty's ship the Gaspé, and I will hang you at the yardarm." To this Whipple, nothing daunted, replied: "Sir, always catch a man before you hang him."
She had twice taken the ground, once so hard and fast that she had shifted her guns and lightered a hundred tons of stores among the gulls and mews of a half-sunken reef; she had had an affair with the unruly natives of the Walker Group, and had blown a village to fragments, and not a few of the Walkers themselves into a land as uncharted as their own; she had tried a beach-comber for murder, and had dangled him at the main yardarm, giving him later on a Church of England service, a hammock, and the use of a cannon ball at his feet; she had poked her nose into cannibal bays, where women of wild beauty and wilder license swam off to the ship in hundreds until the marines drove them back with muskets, and fired at their own comrades, who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death always close aboard.
I am coiling such a web round them, and making it fast, as you may see a spider, first to this point and then to the other, that I won't leave my persecutors one solitary chance of escape. I'll draw it quietly round and round closer and closer till they can neither blow nor budge, and then up to the yardarm they go, with what breath is left in them.
If he refused to fire, he would be strung up to the yardarm; if he fired and missed, perhaps other gunners would fire, and once started they might raze the fishing-post. If he dismounted the gun, the matter would probably remain only a jest, for such as yet Richambeau regarded it.
When he got to them he found both had partially secured themselves, though the least lurch of their bodies would certainly have placed them in a more perilous position. The young sailor's task was both delicate and difficult, but he managed it so well that no harm came to them. One of the men, as is the practice when reefing, was straddle legs on the yardarm, and had a turn of a rope round him.
This gallant young man deliberately passed along the 'Shannon's' foreyard, which was braced up to the 'Chesapeake's' mainyard, and thence into her top. All further annoyance from the 'Chesapeake's' mizzen top was put a stop to by another of the 'Shannon's' midshipmen, who fired at the Americans from the yardarm as fast as his men could load the muskets and hand them to him.
I shrieked out with terror, expecting that the next instant, as the yardarm swung round, he would be dashed to pieces on the deck, or hove off into the raging sea. The kind-hearted mate, recollecting him, came rushing forward, also believing that his destruction was certain, unless he could be caught as he fell.
He glanced timorously toward the dark forest behind from which he momentarily expected to see the savage, snarling faces of the head-hunters appear. "Surrender! You swabs," called Ward from below, "or we'll string the last mother's son of you to the yardarm." For reply Blanco hurled a heavy fragment of rock at the assaulters.
He at once put them in irons and threatened to hang them to the yardarm of the ship if the captives remaining in the hands of the natives, and also the plundered sea-otter skins, were not immediately surrendered to him. The threat was effective, the greater part of the sea-otter furs and several captives were brought on the ship and delivered to him.
Don Miguel de Espinosa, the Admiral of Spain in the West Indies, and his nephew Don Esteban who sailed with him, did not lack the will to bring the adventurer to the yardarm. With them this business of capturing Blood, which was now an international affair, was also a family matter. Spain, through the mouth of Don Miguel, did not spare her threats.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking