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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“So it’s you we have to thank for our dressing-down, you little rascal,” I replied.

“Alas, yes. I’m one of the damned rogues and thieves. I could tell you the names of two others, but I forbear. We were thirsty and too lazy to go to the main top for the gun barrel. And there were the coconuts, such a tempting sight, a great heap of them between the guns on the quarter-deck. I wish they were there now; I’d steal another. There’s nothing more refreshing than coconut water. Curse old Nelson’s breadfruit garden! It keeps a man thirsty all the time.”

We were all, in fact, envious of our breadfruit plants. Whatever happened, they had to be watered regularly, and in order to cut down the amount drunk by the ship’s company Bligh had thought of a very excellent and ingenious arrangement to prevent us from quenching our thirst too often. Any man who wanted a drink had first to climb to the main top to fetch a gun barrel left there. He then climbed down with this to the scuttle butt, outside the galley, inserted the gun barrel into the bunghole, and, having sucked up his drink, he was required to carry the drinking tube to the main top again. No man, no matter how thirsty he might be, was permitted to make more than two of these gun-barrel climbs during his watch, and a lazy man did without his drink until thirst got the better of him.