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

345 страница из 953

There were grey days of continual violent squalls when it was impossible to work on the dictionary. The frigate laboured heavily through the seas, rolling and pitching, and we rolled with her, each man clinging to his ringbolt in an attempt to maintain his position. Often we were thrown to the extent of our chains, and our wrists and ankles were terribly galled by the bands of iron around them. To add to our misery in seasons of bad weather, the rain trickled down upon us day and night through the uncaulked seams in the roof of our prison, and we slept, or, better, tried to sleep, on boards slimy wet.

We had been several days at sea when we learned that the Pandora was not alone on this voyage. She was accompanied by the Resolution, the little schooner which Morrison and the others had built. Edwards had fitted her out as a tender to the frigate, and she was commanded by Mr. Oliver, the master’s mate of the Pandora, with a crew of a midshipman, a quartermaster, and six seamen. She was a beautiful little craft and outsailed the frigate in any kind of weather. Many and many a time poor Morrison, and the men who were to have gone with him in the Resolution, had occasion to lament their fate in being captured at Papara. Whatever hardships they might have suffered would have seemed light indeed compared with the misery of existence in “Pandora’s Box.”