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Updated: August 1, 2024
A poise of the steel-shod steering pole, we grasped our paddles, a downward dip, quick followed by Godefroy at the stern, and out shot the canoe, swift, light, lithe, alert, like a racer to the bit, with a gurgling of waters below the gunwales, the keel athrob to the swirl of a turbulent current and a trail of eddies dimpling away on each side.
One of the most amusing things we did was to go after dinner in little boats and form part of the river audience in front of some other house-boat where something was going on, crowded in between other boats, having to ship our oars and pull ourselves along by our neighbours' gunwales, getting locked for perhaps half an hour, until suddenly our Geisha girls or niggers would start the cry "Up river," when away we would all go, entertainers and entertained, pulling up the river to the lights of another house-boat, enjoying the music for a few minutes and then slipping away in the darkness toward the lights of Henley village, or perhaps back to the Lulu.
With that the coil of half-inch rope which he held looped on his arm made a circling whirl through the air, the end falling right across the gunwales of the boat, close to the after thwart, where sat the second of the castaways, who eagerly stretched out his hand to clutch at it.
It must be added that wooden surfaces are often painted on the flat, especially shields, the outer surfaces of walls of PADI huts, and tombs, also grave hats and the gunwales of boats, and decorative planks in the inner walls of the long gallery of the house.
It was a splendid sight to see boat after boat shoot out from the landing-place, and cut through the calm bosom of the river, as the men bent their sturdy backs, until the thick oars creaked and groaned on the gunwales and flashed in the stream, more and more vigorously at each successive stroke, until their friends on the bank, who were anxious to see the last of them, had to run faster and faster in order to keep up with them, as the rowers warmed at their work, and made the water gurgle at the bows their bright blue and scarlet and white trappings reflected in the dark waters in broken masses of colour, streaked with long lines of shining ripples, as if they floated on a lake of liquid rainbows.
While the boatmen held the two crafts together by the gunwales, the helpless form, swathed in a blanket, was passed across and propped beside Maria in the stern. Then in stepped a short, stout, red-faced man, and the two boatmen nimbly followed, with their paddles. The dug-out was weighted almost to the gunwale by the new load, and Charley caught his breath, in dismay.
As the tide continued to rise, Ives feared the whole flat would soon be inundated, so everything belonging to the expedition was stowed on board till the Explorer's gunwales were no more than six inches above the surface. Through this circumstance, the expedition came near a disastrous end the next night, when the steamer proceeded up the river on the flood tide.
"On the eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke. We in the sternsheets stood together against them. It was all a madness. We were starved sore, but we were mad for water. It was over the water it began. For, see you, it was our custom to lick the dew from the oar-blades, the gunwales, the thwarts, and the inside planking. And each man of us had developed property in the dew-collecting surfaces.
We now had reason to congratulate ourselves upon the foresight which had suggested to us the idea of partially covering in the boats with their sails as a protection against the inroads of the sea; for within ten minutes of the outburst not only was the air full of flying sheets of spindrift and scud-water that, but for the precaution referred to, would have kept us busily baling, but in addition to this a short, steep, tumultuous sea was rapidly rising, which at frequent intervals rose above the boats' gunwales, and would have pooped us dangerously had the boats been left in their ordinary unprotected condition.
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side; all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this was thrilling.
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