“The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out, At one stride comes the dark,”
to be succeeded, after long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colors of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of Eos, reinvents itself in the human mind as soon as it asserts its power—it may be its sacred right—to translate nature into the language of the feelings.
I am not likely to forget that next morning, the 28th of August, (17—). It was a fine summer’s morning, and there was just a little sea on, with a strongish breeze blowing from the eastward, but not enough to prevent boats coming off from Portsmouth. I counted forty sail-of-the-line, a dozen frigates and smaller ships of war, and well-nigh three hundred merchant vessels, riding, as of course we were, to the flood with our heads towards Cowes.
You will understand that under the lower-deck was fitted a cistern, into which the sea-water was received and then pumped up by a hand-pump, fixed in the middle of the gun-deck, for the purpose of washing the two lower gun-decks. The water was let into this cistern by a pipe which passed through the ship’s side, and which was secured by a stopcock on the inside. It had been found the morning before that this watercock, which was about three feet below the water line, was out of order, and must be repaired.
The foreman came off from the dockyard, and said that it was necessary to careen the ship over to port, sufficiently to raise the mouth of the pipe, which went through the ship’s timbers below, clean out of the water, that he and his men might work at it. Between seven and eight o’clock the order was given to run the larboard guns out as far as they could go, the larboard ports being opened. The starboard guns were also run in amidships and secured by tackles, the moving over of this great weight of metal bringing the larboard lower-deck port-sills just level with the water. The men were then able to get at the mouth of the pipe. For an hour the ship remained in this position, while the carpenters were at work. We had been taking in rum and shot on the previous day, and now a sloop called the Lark, which belonged to the three brothers, came alongside with the last cargo of rum; she having been secured to the larboard side, the hands were piped to clear the lighter.