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Take heed you pilot her in right. Cheer up, cried out Pantagruel; cheer up, my boys; let us be ourselves again. Do you see yonder, close by our ship, two barks, three sloops, five ships, eight pinks, four yawls, and six frigates making towards us, sent by the good people of the neighbouring island to our relief? But who is this Ucalegon below, that cries and makes such a sad moan?
Subsequently, on the night of April 26th, six other transports with numerous barges loaded with hay, corn, freight, and provisions, were drifted past Vicksburg; of these the Tigress was hit, and sunk just as she reached the river-bank below, on our side: I was there with my yawls, and saw Colonel Lagow, of General Grant's staff, who had passed the batteries in the Tigress, and I think he was satisfied never to attempt such a thing again.
What startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy piles of the Pont Marie, to the light arches of the new Pont Louis Philippe. Strange masses peopled the river, a sleeping flotilla of small boats and yawls, a floating washhouse, and a dredger moored to the quay.
Moreover, before steam made coast traffic independent of wind, the sand-banks outside the roads were a great source of profit to the beach men, who went off in their long yawls to such craft as "missed stays" coming through a "gat," or managed to run aground on one of the sand-banks in some way or other.
But it was sprinkled with smaller vessels sloops, and yawls, and luggers all filled with people and slowly creeping seaward. There was one little boat, quite near to us, which seemed to be waiting for some one. There were some people on it, but it was not crowded. "Come," I said, "this is for us. We must wade out to it."
In passing Vicksburg, she was damaged in the hull and had a steam-pipe cut away, but this was soon repaired. The Henry Clay was set on fire by bursting shells, and burned up; one of my yawls picked up her pilot floating on a piece of wreck, and the bulk of her crew escaped in their own yawl-boat to the shore above.
Under us the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests, and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind them; and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream, showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the limit of the shores.
His game was up, and he saw it; and Ebenezer Gryce's career had begun. Like all destructive things the device by which I had been run into the river was simple enough when understood. In the first place it had been constructed to serve the purpose of a stairway and chute. The latter was in plain sight when it was used by the sailmakers to run the finished sails into the waiting yawls below.
"His game was up, and he saw it; and Ebenezer Gryce's career had begun. "Like all destructive things the device by which I had been run into the river was simple enough when understood. In the first place it had been constructed to serve the purpose of a stairway and chute. The latter was in plain sight when it was used by the sailmakers to run the finished sails into the waiting yawls below.
The ships sailed up this inlet for several miles, when they cast anchor. Natives came off in three canoes, shaped like Norway yawls. Having drawn near, a person stood up in one of them and invited the strangers, in a speech and by gesture, to land, at the same time strewing handfuls of red feathers towards them, while his companions threw red dust in the same way.
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