Starboard Lights; Salt Water Tales (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FRIEND THAT SAVED THE SHIP. On The mountain side above white Kingston, in the island of Jamaica that shines like a cat's eye in the blue tropic sea, there lies buried a friend of mine that save a ship for me. She was an old wooden craft, but as pretty as ever you saw. If you could have watched her raise herself out of green water like a strong creature taking a glorious long breath, or push into a valley of sea, like a horse breasting a fence, you'd never have wanted to see a finer sight or wonder why I wish for her sticks and spars shining brave and bold against the sky, instead of this mastless red- and-black funnel that I'm commanding now. Well, it's all over now. We've got to study coal and let the winds go by if we want to stay at sea. But this friend of mine, he sailed with me when sailing was sailing. Lor'! though I miss him, yet, come to think, how could he ever have contented himself to go to sea on one of these rumbling machine ships ? If I hadn't wanted a berth I'd have let my first impressions of the new owners of this ship that I'm going to tell about decide the question. I could spot in a minute where they'd done mean things to her?let a bit run down here and there, give her cheap fittings where her old owners would hardly have been content with the best, scimp paint, and like that. You couldn't really say just how she looked bad, but bad she looked?at least to me, who had often envied the Firefly's captain when I was commanding only a second-rater in the same line. The new owners were mean people?everybody on South street knew that. So I didn't make much talk, but you can bet there was some quiet overhauling of rigging until I had the dear old craft as trim and able as she could be. She took on a fair cargo, but there was so much room aboard that it...