The Emigrant Ship

Excerpt:- The brig floated slowly forwards under ill-fitting lower and topmast studding-sails, the watch scrubbing the decks, the scuppers gushing cloudy streams into the blue brine which passed alongside crisp and beautiful with little foam bells and twinkling bubbles of froth and lines of ripple breaking from the cutwater, like the strings of a harp musical with their fountain-like notes. The land was in sight from the deck at ten, a double-humped stretch of blue shadow, fining down into a pencil-shaped point south-east. It was the Great Salvage Island, a rock about a mile broad, and little less than a mile wide, then bearing about two points
on the starboard bow.

Cadman was on deck at this time, armed with an immense, old-fiishioned telescope, which he would frequently level as though it had been a blunderbuss. Fletcher hung beside him, and sometimes took the great glass from his hand and pointed it. The carpenter had charge of the deck, and was walking in the waist. I was too anxious to see what went forward to keep below, and stationed myself beside the galley, where I was out of sight of Cadman. The carpenter, spying me, came trudging a little way forward, so as to talk without stopping in his short pendulum walk. The watch were scattered about the deck ; one at the wheel, two on jobs aloft, a fourth stitching at a sail near the main-hatch.

Author: William Clark Russell

Title: The Emigrant Ship

Series: n/a

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Format: HC

Date: 1893

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