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Updated: May 22, 2025
Captain Latimer, with the three mates, the carpenter, and one of the hands, had sailed away south in the longboat, vowing yardarms and a man-of-war, and when last seen was sinking over the horizon in the direction of the Fiji Islands.
The Miranda also, steaming up the river Kola for thirty miles, attacked the capital of Russian Lapland, of the same name, and, with her yardarms almost over the walls, set the city on fire and destroyed most of the public buildings and magazines.
The vessel rolled till her bulwarks were under water, and the yardarms at times dipped into the sea, and the men on deck were forced to lash themselves to some standing object, to retain their footing.
The huge vessels lie over on one side and are flamed with fires of brushwood to rid them of seaweed, while their yardarms soak in the water. There is a smell of pitch and the deafening hammering of shipwrights lining the hulls with sheets of copper. Sometimes, between the masts, a gap opened and Tartarin could see the harbour mouth and the movement of ships.
Ronald, with the old man by his side, stood conning the ship, while two seamen with sharp eyes were placed at the end of the jib-boom, and others at the fore yardarms, to give notice of any danger they might discover. "There'll be no use keeping the lead going, sir," said Old Doull. "You may get a cast of twenty fathom, and the next moment have the ship's bows hard and fast."
You'll never fetch it that tack;" when he'd shift his helm, feeling the edge of the breeze with as neat a piece of seamanship as a man could ask, and come up dead into the wind, his sails dropping back stiff on his yardarms, and the subject of matrimony speared on the end of his bowsprit; then Madame Bill would get up, and run away laughing.
How well she carries her maintop-gallant sail! What a neat counter, and how well formed between the yardarms! I’ll heave ahead and have a look at her bow chasers, head rails, and cut heads, for I think I have seen her before somewhere. You,” said he to me, “can take the one on the starboard hand.” He then let go my arm and shot ahead.
What if the dockyards of Chatham should again be destroyed? What if the Tower itself should be bombarded? What if the vast wood of masts and yardarms below London Bridge should be in ablaze? Nor was this all. Evil tidings had just arrived from the Low Countries. The allied forces under Waldeck had, in the neighbourhood of Fleurus, encountered the French commanded by the Duke of Luxemburg.
Then all hands would stand by to slack a sheet here or reef a sail there, and Ghent, who was a bold sailor, would take the kicking tiller with Job's help, and keep the big ship on her course, the last possible foot of canvas straining at the yardarms.
The crew dared not hoist sails, because not a man of the St. Peter had the physical strength to climb and lower canvas. The rain turned to sleet. The sleet froze to the rotting sails, to the ice-logged hull, to the wan yardarms frost-white like ghosts. At every lurch of the sea slush slithered down from the rigging on the shivering seamen.
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