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

351 страница из 953

ssss1

I will pass briefly over the events of August. They were, no doubt, interesting enough to the members of the Pandora’s company. To the prisoners in the roundhouse they passed with interminable slowness. Islands were raised and left behind as we proceeded toward Endeavour Straits. We were sailing much the same course as that followed by Captain Bligh in his open-boat voyage to Timor, and as we ploughed through that vast ocean scattered with islands and shoals all but unknown to white men, I gained a truer conception of the remarkable nature of Bligh’s achievement. That he should have succeeded in bringing seventeen men, without arms, and so meagrely provided with food and water, through fair weather and foul, to a destination nearly four thousand miles from his point of departure seemed in the nature of a miracle. This achievement was our principal topic of conversation in the roundhouse. Whatever our personal feelings toward Bligh, there was not one of us who did not feel proud, as Englishmen, of his voyage in the Bounty’s launch.