Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 8, 2024
The next morning we left Tukuran, seeking better soundings than we had at first obtained, but finding the water nearly as deep in one place as another, it was decided to leave at sunrise on the following day and lay the cable as best we could.
The Signal Corps found the trench at Tukuran a difficult problem in that it had to be dug down a very steep hill leading from the stone-enclosed fort to the beach, but by evening of the first day this was accomplished, and the shore end laid and buoyed.
On our first visit to Zamboanga we remained a day only, for by evening our shore end was laid and the office established, so that at daybreak the next morning we sailed for Tukuran, Mindanao, thus deferring our intercourse with Zamboanga, though not terminating it.
All went well until late in the afternoon, when communication with Tukuran was suddenly interrupted, whereupon we hauled in several miles of cable, and coming upon the fault, cut it out and "spoke" Tukuran.
After laying a hundred-knot stretch of cable between there and Point Flecha, we began to take soundings, and for four days sailed back and forth between Tukuran and the Point, seeking water not too deep for cable laying, though in places the sea swallowed up our sounding wire for twelve hundred fathoms. Think of it a mile and a quarter!
It was a preposterous tale, and nothing would do but that the cable-ship Munchausen should take a party ashore where all might witness the fish of Tukuran taking a constitutional on the beach, after the manner of the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Nothing daunted, the officer agreed to the proposition, and so confident was he that even Mrs.
Good hunting stories were of course numerous, and some of these so fired the Nimrod of the trip our major-quartermaster that he set off at daybreak one morning, gun in hand, accompanied by the crack shot among the soldiers of Tukuran, each prepared to slay his tens of thousands.
Before leaving Tukuran one of the officers belonging to the Signal Corps well-nigh lost his reputation for veracity, or sobriety, by coming back to the ship one day with a most amazing tale as to some fish he had seen promenading promenading, forsooth! on the beach. Everyone was hilariously skeptical.
I do not know that they ever became so annoying that the men had to resort to the cat-discouraging bootjack or soda bottle, but I do know that those Tukuran soldiers had so much venison that they would eat canned corned beef or bacon in preference.
But before we reached Zamboanga, a Signal Corps man, whom we left behind at Tukuran to complete the establishment of the lines there, sent a message to the major over the cable we were then laying, to the effect that he had seen a herd of deer from the window of his telegraph office that very morning, and, being a cable-ship man, and so not in league with the Ananiases of Tukuran, the major must fain believe him, whereupon he made some remarks not worthy of record.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking