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Updated: May 31, 2025
It took Theriere off his guard, threw him down and hurtled him roughly across the deck, landing him in the scuppers, bleeding and stunned. The next wave would carry him overboard. Released from surveillance the balance of the crew pushed and fought their way into the cabin only the mucker remained without, staring first at the prostrate form of the mate and then at the open cabin hatch.
It was an unforgettable scene the mate in the high place, the men, sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight down through the windless air, while the Elsinore, with hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs.
She rose a little to windward, but her lee-rail was still under water. Down in the scuppers, in the tangle of ropes and splintered wood, sundry dark forms, looking more like bundles of dirty rags than anything else, rolled and tossed helplessly. These were dead and drowning men.
Posh asserts that he has seen his "guv'nor" lying in the lee scuppers while the Scandal was heeling over in a stiff breeze, and permitting the wash of the sea to run over him till he was drenched to the skin. Indeed, although his long lean body looked frail, he was reckless in the way in which he treated it. Posh tells one story which I give in his words.
And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person. It was my time to run away if I ever intended to. Within the next day or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me, that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash.
Toni, the small Fijian who had chanted the song of Black Fernando's hell, was caught by a huge wave and pounded hard against the cabin. The mad turmoil of water swept his nearly lifeless form into the scuppers, but before another comber could snatch him overboard, I managed to reach his side and drag him into safety.
The momentarily quiet sea, too, had got up again, and was now covered with huge broken waves raised aloft in pyramids one moment, and the next scooped out into yawning valleys, into which the vessel plunged, with a shock that made her timbers vibrate with the sledge-hammer thud of the bows meeting the billows full butt, the concussion causing columns of spray to be thrown up that came in over the cathead, drenching the fo'c's'le and pouring in a cascade into the waist, whence the broken water, washing aft along the deck, forming a lake on the lee-side, where the scuppers were level with the sea, from the ship's heeling over.
After talking it over for some time they determined to submit the question to their father on their return. It took them two more tides before they were off Sheerness. The wind was now more favourable, and having increased somewhat in strength, the Susan made her way briskly along, heeling over till the water ran along her scuppers.
Then, as a steed shaking his mane after a shower, she throws the briny water off, through hawse-holes and scuppers, till her decks are clear again. A cry of relief ascends from the crew, instinctive and simultaneous.
But the rocket being upside down he of course failed to set it off, and then he unluckily tried the other end, which was uppermost, with the disastrous result, as my English informant described it, that 'the hexplosion blowed him clean out of the galley. 'Blowed him! said I, unconsciously adopting my friend's expression, 'where? 'Why, said he, 'hout of the galley into the lee scuppers.
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