And when the ship was caught and could not bear up into the wind,
we let her drive. And running under a certain island which is
called Clauda, we had much work to come by the boat;
Which when they had taken up, they used helps, under-girdling the
ship; and fearing lest they should fall into the quicksands, strake
sail and so were driven.
The souls of the jolly, jolly mariners in Kipling’s “Last Chantey,”
plucking at their harps and they plucked unhandily, listened with
professional approval when the stout Apostle Paul lifted his voice in
turn and sang to them:
Once we frapped a ship, and she labored woundily,
There were fourteen score of these,
And they blessed Thee on their knees,
When they learned Thy Grace and Glory under
Malta by the sea!
And so the _Ramillies_ was frapped, or under-girdled by passing hempen
hawsers under her keel and around the straining hull to hold her
timbers together before she literally fell apart. It was a fine feat of
seamanship, but unavailing. The admiral had nothing more to say about
the crime of tossing overboard his Majesty’s valuable guns, munitions,
and stores, and the crew fairly gutted the ship of everything weighty,
including both bower anchors. As the day wore on toward nightfall,
about twenty other ships were still visible, and the officers urged the
admiral to shift his pennant to one of them and so save himself; but
this he positively refused to do, deeming it, as he declared,
unpardonable of a commander-in-chief to desert his garrison in
distress; that his living a few years longer was of very little
consequence, but that, by leaving his ship at such a time, he
should discourage and slacken the exertions of the people by
setting them a very bad example.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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