Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“I have been many years at sea,” Christian went on, “and I can tell you that the welfare of men on shipboard depends on things which seem small. A joke at the right moment, a kind word, or a glass of grog is sometimes more efficacious than the cat-of-nine-tails. With the surgeon gone, life on the Bounty will not be what it was.”

Christian spoke no more that night, but sat gazing into the fire, a sombre expression in his eyes. Maimiti, a silent girl, laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep, while he stroked her hair tenderly and absently. I lay awake for a long time, thinking of Old Bacchus and of the trick of fate which had so abruptly closed his career, on a heathen island, twelve thousand miles from England. Perhaps his jovial shade would be well content to haunt the moonlit groves of Tahiti, where the sea he loved was only a pistol shot away—its salt smell in the air and the thunder of its breakers sounding day and night. And he had died on shipboard, as he would have desired, safe from the dreaded years of retirement on shore. Christian was right, I thought; without Old Bacchus, life on the Bounty could not be the same.