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Updated: June 26, 2025
The baronet was evidently bent on retrieving his character and making up for his past carelessness, for he handled his strangely-shaped vessel with most consummate skill, bringing the strain upon the hawser very gradually, and, when he had done so, coaxing the barque's head round until her nose and that of the Flying Fish pointed straight toward the rapidly narrowing passage between the bergs.
Whether by this apparent apathy her people hoped to lull us into a condition of equal carelessness, it is of course impossible for me to say; but, if so, they signally failed, for immediately that the barque's outline faded into an indistinct blur in the growing darkness, we went to work and shook out a reef all round, never doubting but that they were at that moment doing precisely the same thing.
Nor was he less astonished at the sight of the handsome little cutter lying at anchor close in with the shore. For this was the first time that he had ever been on deck since the day on which the island had been "made" from the barque's fore-yard; and everything was therefore absolutely new to him, save such slight glimpses as he had been able to catch through the port-hole of his cabin.
As our boat passed the bowsprit of the Lydia, my father turned her head towards the ship, and my uncle Mansie was alert and ready to catch the coil of rope that was at that moment thrown down to us from the barque's forecastle. I think the rope was awkwardly thrown, or the man throwing it had miscalculated the rate at which we were driving past.
The crew had, without exception, at the moment of the barque's foundering, grasped some rope or other portion of the vessel's equipment, the death-clutch upon which was in no single instance relaxed; hence they were, one and all, dragged hopelessly to the bottom with the wreck. With the female, however, it was different.
The night was bright with the light of shining stars, and the sea, although the breeze was brisk, was smooth as a mountain lake, only the rip, ripy rip of the barque's cutwater and the bubbling sounds of her eddying wake broke the silence of the night. Ten miles away the verdure-clad peaks and spurs of lofty Bougainville stood clearly out, silhouetted against the sea-rim on the starboard hand.
The barque's work went on; the decks were washed down, the look-out aloft hailed and nothing reported, and at seven bells the crew went to breakfast, at which hour we had risen the distant sail with a rapidity that somewhat puzzled the captain and me. For, first of all, she was not so far off now but that we could distinguish the lay of her head.
We had taken up a position exactly to leeward of our neighbour; and, as Ryan had anticipated, we soon found that the schooner was looking up a full point higher than the bigger craft; but this was very evenly balanced by the greater amount of lee drift that we made, in consequence of our much lighter draught; we therefore, contrived to maintain our position with almost perfect exactitude, except that the schooner manifested the greater tendency to forge ahead, thus placing herself gradually further upon the barque's lee bow.
Closer and closer the ships edged in to the land, and then, as they opened out the long white stretch of beach that fringed the lee of the island, they hove-to till daylight. But if there were no lights on deck there were plenty below, and in the barque's roomy cabin a number of men were sitting and talking together over liquor and cigars.
"The skipper has his wife on board," remarked another; and the light of the crimson sunset all ablaze behind the London smoke, throwing a glow of Bengal light upon the barque's spars, faded away from the Hope Reach.
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