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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There was no need to reply. As we rose to the swell, every head was turned to the eastward; and there, not half a mile distant, we again saw approaching our remorseless enemy—rain.

It came on in what appeared to be a solid wall of blackness, faintly lighted by a dull grayish glow from the sky before it. There was no wind immediately behind; the slowness of its approach assured us of that; therefore, we waited in silence, while the sound increased and spread, now deadened as we fell into the trough, more loud as we rose to the crest of the next wave. Then, as though at the last moment it had leaped to make sure of us, we were in the midst of it—drenched, half drowned, gasping for breath, in a deluge such as we had never before experienced.

In an instant I lost sight of the men in the forward part of the boat. This, I know, will scarcely be believed by those whose experience of rain has been only in the northern latitudes, who know nothing of the enormous weight of water released in a tropical cloudburst. The fact remains that the launch vanished from my sight save for the after part of it where I sat, and the men immediately before my eyes were but shadows blurred by sheets of almost solid water. I heard Captain Bligh’s voice, faintly, above the hiss and thunder of the deluge. The words were indistinguishable, but we well knew what we had to do. We bailed with the desperation of men who feel the water gaining upon them even as they bail; who feel it cover their feet and rise slowly toward their knees. And it was not sea water that we threw over the side. It was the pure sweet water of clouds, which men, adrift in a small boat in mid-ocean, so often pray for in vain, with blackening lips and swelling tongues; and we hurled it away from us with bailing scoops, coconut shells, the copper pot, with our hats, with our cupped hands, lest this precious fluid, which Captain Bligh had, rightly, doled out to us a quarter of a pint at a time, should be our death. There was irony in the situation, though we had no time to think of it then.