Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The majority of the carriers and half the police went round by the beach, but we in the two whaleboats had some exciting moments in the rough sea, though with the sails up we made good progress. We passed two of the canoes partially wrecked, and apparently in great difficulties.
"Hard down with your tail, there!" cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity. All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs.
Meanwhile the tar-buckets had been heated up, and those fellows gave the canvas and the hull all about it a good coating of tar. We ran several miles on this tack, and until the job was completed. Then, when the men and the tar-buckets were inboard again, the Scarboro was put over on the other tack and we beat back toward the whaleboats.
The rivers, it was promised, would flow with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming in endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages, and, after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and his followers withdrew. Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared before the little palisaded town of Detroit.
Far above her waist rose her smokestack. Overhead upon the mainmast was affixed the crow's nest. Whaleboats and cutters swung from her davits, while all her decks were cumbered with barrels, with crates, with boxes and strangely shaped bales and cases. She drew nearer, continuing that slow, proud progress down the bay, honoured as no visiting sovereign had ever been.
Two hundred men were chosen for the undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit. At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to know the object of their journeying.
Dag Daughtry strolled along the beach, Michael at his heels or running circles of delight around him at every repetition of that strange low lip- noise, and paused just outside the circle of lantern light where dusky forms laboured with landing cargo from the whaleboats and where the Commissioner's clerk and the Makambo's super-cargo still wrangled over the bill of lading.
The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate, lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice. "You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to me. "You double up in a minute and go down.
She rose flush with the water, put on full speed, and picked them up one after another on the end of her ram, and tossed them aside into the depths as rapidly as an enraged whale might have disposed of a fleet of whaleboats. The last boat had hardly gone down when signals were seen flashing up into the sky from over Dungeness.
The anchor was broken out to a song of farewell from Lilolilo's singing boys on the quarterdeck, while we, in the big canoes and whaleboats, saw the first breeze fill the vessel's sails and the distance begin to widen. "Through all the confusion and excitement, Lilolilo, at the rail, who must say last farewells and quip last jokes to many, looked squarely down at me.
Word Of The Day