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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We now quickly embarked, and, with the pinnace in the van, set out on our voyage to Timor.

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We had a fair wind and a calm sea, and the sail was hoisted directly we left the key. Edwards sat at the tiller. He looked as gaunt and ill-kempt as any of his men, but his lips were set in their usual thin line, and from the expression on his face he might have been walking the quarter-deck of the Pandora. One of the men cried, “Ho for Timor, lads!” but there was no response. We were so tortured by thirst that scarcely a word passed among the company.

Morrison, Ellison, and I had been placed in the bow of the pinnace. Her burden of twenty-four men brought her low in the water and made it impossible for Edwards to separate us from the seamen; but lest we should somehow contaminate them, he took the precaution of placing Hayward, and Rickards, the master’s mate, next to us. When it was necessary for either of them to take the tiller, Packer, the gunner or Edmonds, the captain’s clerk, took his place. When the wind failed we took our turns at the oars with the others, but we were never permitted to forget that we were pirates on the way to a rope’s end on some ship of war in Portsmouth Harbour. Hayward evidently felt the awkwardness of his situation in being placed directly beside us in a small boat; but under Edwards’s watchful eye he managed to maintain toward us his usual manner of contemptuous aloofness.