Hi-You (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906. Excerpt: ... weather beam, sir; out side-lights, sir;--my God she'll be into us " And then a voice faintly from the poop--" Hard up, hard up, hard up the helm," in the voice of Nicholson Barboard, the chief mate. Too late; the helm had been hard down, and the barque had been gathering way in the freshening wind. And then what happened. Abram Copley, A.B., who had now arisen from the torpor of a healthy animal, described afterwards to an expectoratingly sceptical crowd of jettisoned compatriots, with verbal decorations, in the Sailor's Home at Signapore, whither the swift-sailing four-master was bound. But this may be said here of those moments of terror that immediately followed the discovery of the big merchantman. That before the barque could answer the reversed helm, the huge fourmaster's short steel jibboom was tearing the main shrouds of the John Bunyan into rope yarns; and the bulwarks were screaming and parting under the sharp iron prow; and a terrible shock had thrown every man off his feet as the smaller ship careened and trembled. But Copley's narrative of what he said and did in those moments of alarm, and what should have been done but was left undone, and how disaster could have been avoided (although the barque had no side lights shewing) and so forth, in the manner of the orthodox sea lawyer, would take a whole chapter to recount. Confusion, the result of the personal tyranny, that rules a sailing ship rather than a sense of discipline, was the prevailing feature of the calamity. But fear, at first, made them all full of a desire to obey any and every order of the bewildered chief mate, who commanded and countermanded in the same breath. If one thought dominated Captain Tuggy's mind, as he rushed up the companion ladder in his sleeping pyjamas, it had ...