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Updated: June 7, 2025
We, the Water Sprites, had shifted and rigged, and were all mustered aft on the poop, enjoying the little air there was, as it fanned gently, and waiting for the announcement of supper. It was a pitch dark night, neither moon nor stars. The murky clouds seemed to have settled down on the mastheads, shrouding every object in the thickest gloom.
And a gallant sight she looked, with her brightly-painted hull, her big gilded figure-head and head rails flashing in the sun, her mastheads and yard-arms bedizened with banner and pennons streaming in the breeze, and her painted sails bellying and straining at yard and stay with the warm breathing of the trade-wind.
We watched the stranger as she was revealed at uncertain but decreasing intervals by the silent sheet-lightning, which was now flickering up all round the horizon, affording us momentary glimpses of the great lowering cloud-masses that overhung our mastheads as though ready to fall and crush us, the shining undulations of the swell, with the small overrunning ripples caused by the faint breathing of the breeze, the distant land, and the brigantine sliding furtively along within its shadow.
Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse.
The red and white signal lights twinkled at intervals at the mastheads of different vessels, while beams of light showed on the still, dark water from open ports. The whole fleet lay quiet while the men listened to the strains of music from the "Oregon." It was more like the rendezvous of a cruising yacht club than a fleet of warships gathered in the enemy's country.
The whole fleet anchored in the stream. All night long the Morse lamps winked at the mastheads, the ships' lights twinkled on the water in long twisting lines, and the great glow of a million lamps of the city lit with fire the waters of the harbour, and the huge hills stood out black against the sky. A day of squalls followed, and dragged slowly by. Why were the anchors not weighed?
"We won't make Hao until ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he was plaintively demanding, "And what are the currents doing?" Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in drizzling calms and violent squalls.
The crew regarded the mishap with stolid satisfaction. The delay which it would occasion in the prosecution of the voyage was nothing to them; the ship was stripped of everything above her lower mastheads, leaving so much the less canvas for her crew to handle, and that was all they cared about at the moment.
At length a tall ship was seen sailing up the harbour with gay flags flying from the mastheads. The other vessels as she approached saluted her with their guns; the captain, who was on the watch, pronounced her to be the Sea Venture, the ship of the good admiral, Sir George Summers, commanded by Captain Newport, with Sir Thomas Gates, the new Governor of Virginia, on board.
The sun had now gone down, the sky was overcast, and the sea had a leaden gloomy look there was a swell also, and the ship rolled so much from side to side, that, as I looked up and saw the mastheads forming arches in the sky, I could not help fancying that I should be sent off when I got up there like a stone from a sling, or an ancient catapult, right into the water.
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