The Boats of the "Glen Carrig": Being an account of their Adventures in the Strange places of the Earth, after the foundering of the good ship Glen Carrig through striking upon a hidden rock in the unknown seas to the Southward; as told by John Winterstraw, Gent., to his son James Winterstraw, in the year 1757, and by him committed very properly and legibly to manuscriptHodgson, William Hope
Science
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig": Being an account of their Adventures in the Strange places of the Earth, after the foundering of the good ship Glen Carrig through striking upon a hidden rock in the unknown seas to the Southward; as told by John Winterstraw, Gent., to his son James Winterstraw, in the year 1757, and by him committed very properly and legibly to manuscript
Immediately upon my shout, the bo'sun rushed out from the tent, the men
following, and every one with his weapon, save the man who had left his
spear in the sand, and that lay now somewhere beyond the light of the
fire. Then the bo'sun shouted, to know what thing had caused me to cry
out; but I replied nothing, only held up my hand for quietness, yet when
this was granted, the noises in the valley had ceased; so that the bo'sun
turned to me, being in need of some explanation; but I begged him to hark
a little longer, which he did, and, the sounds re-commencing almost
immediately, he heard sufficient to know that I had not waked them all
without due cause. And then, as we stood each one of us staring into the
darkness where lay the valley, I seemed to see again some shadowy thing
upon the boundary of the firelight; and, in the same instant, one of the
men cried out and cast his spear into the darkness. But the bo'sun turned
upon him with a very great anger; for in throwing his weapon, the man had
left himself without, and thus brought danger to the whole; yet, as will
be remembered, I had done likewise but a little since.
Presently, there coming again a quietness within the valley, and none
knowing what might be toward, the bo'sun caught up a mass of the dry
weed, and, lighting it at the fire, ran with it towards that portion of
the beach which lay between us and the valley. Here he cast it upon the
sand, singing out to some of the men to bring more of the weed, so that
we might have a fire there, and thus be able to see if anything made to
come at us out of the deepness of the hollow.
Presently, we had a very good fire, and by the light of this the two
spears were discovered, both of them stuck in the sand, and no more than
a yard one from the other, which seemed to me a very strange thing.
Now, for a while after the lighting of the second fire, there came no
further sounds from the direction of the valley; nothing indeed to break
the quietness of the island, save the occasional lonely splashes that
sounded from time to time out in the vastness of the weed-continent.
Then, about an hour after I had waked the bo'sun, one of the men who had
been tending the fires came up to him to say that we had come to the end
of our supply of weed-fuel. At that, the bo'sun looked very blank, the
which did the rest of us, as well we might; yet there was no help for it,
until one of the men bethought him of the remainder of the bundle of
reeds which we had cut, and which, burning but poorly, we had discarded
for the weed. This was discovered at the back of the tent, and with it we
fed the fire that burned between us and the valley; but the other we
suffered to die out, for the reeds were not sufficient to support even
the one until the dawn.
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