It
was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side
of an English ship.
No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught
got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy
with a clean, colourless light. I t was while we were all ashore on the
islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like
an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to
her water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of
smoke slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an
hour.
She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met on
the sea no more--black hull, with low, white superstructures, powerfully
rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two hands at her
enormous wheel--steam steering-gear was not a matter of course in these
days--and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue
jackets, ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peak caps--I suppose all her
officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known well by
sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that ship seen once
so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold, pale sunrise I have not
forgotten.
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