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Updated: June 7, 2025
Thus trivially preoccupied, they practically neglected Howe, who on his part stripped for action by sending the supply vessels to the Zaffarine Islands, where the vagarious instincts of their captains would be controlled by an anchor on the bottom. On the 14th the allies bore north from the British, close under the Spanish coast, and visible only from the mastheads.
They descended to the landing-stage. Beneath them the Pool slept, a sheet of polished ebony, whispering to itself, lapping with small stealthy gurgles angles of masonry and ancient piles. On the farther bank tall warehouses reared square old-time heads, their uncompromising, rugged profile relieved here and there by tapering mastheads. A few, scattering, feeble lights were visible.
Mastheads stand up against the sky, and a loose rope swings as the breeze strikes it; a veer of the wind brings a puff of smoke from the funnel of a cabin, where some one is cooking, but it is not disagreeable, like smoke from a house chimney-pot; another veer carries it away again, depend upon it the simplest thing cooked there is nice.
"I took time to think, with a squint at our mastheads for we carried long sticks and said, 'Well, call it twelve mile, mum. It's impossible to speak to a nicety. "'And what, I heard Mr. Robinson observe, as I turned away, 'is twelve miles in this here watery wilderness of leagues?
As he proceeded, the English flag which had been carried by the vessel during her days of incognito, was slowly lowered to the deck, and three little black balls might be seen wriggling their way swiftly but cautiously to the mastheads and mizen peak of the Alabama. Boom! goes the starboard forecastle gun as the reading is ended.
Outside the glare of the steaming forecastle the serene purity of the night enveloped the seamen with its soothing breath, with its tepid breath flowing under the stars that hung countless above the mastheads in a thin cloud of luminous dust.
It does not, like many other ocean-birds, as the booby, one of its own genus, seek rest upon the spars of ships, though it often hovers above the mastheads of sailing vessels, as if taking delight in this situation, and not unfrequently seizes in its beak, and tearing away the pieces of coloured cloth fixed upon the vane.
The sight of the Venetian flag, at the mastheads of the admiral's ship and the other galley, struck dismay into the Genoese. Five of their ships immediately hoisted all canvas and made off, while the other two, surrounded by the Venetian galleys, hauled down their flags. The battle had been a sanguinary one, and but eight hundred men were found alive on board the four galleys captured.
"We never blew up; though we had a jolly good blow-out that evening, after we had taken a thundering big French frigate, which we must have begun to engage before you lost sight of our mastheads. We should have taken her consort, too, before the sun went down, if, like a cur, she hadn't turned tail and run for it; when, as it took us some little time to repair damages, we could not follow."
There is no restraint; there is space: clear water around her, and a clear sky above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming bays opening around her anchorage. She is not abandoned by her own men to the tender mercies of shore people.
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