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

666 страница из 953

There was a blinding glare of lightning, followed by a peal of thunder that seemed to shake the very bed of the deep. At that moment a great sea flung the launch into an all but vertical position. And there sat Bligh as on a throne, lifted high above us all, exalted in more than a physical sense.

“Bail, lads!” he shouted. “By God! We’re beating the sea itself!”

ssss1

During the following night the severity of the weather relaxed; at dawn the sea was so calm that for the first time in fifteen days we found it unnecessary to bail. I had managed to sleep for two or three hours in a miserably cramped position. When I awoke, I lay without moving for some time, gazing in a kind of stupor at what I could see of the others in the boat.

Nelson lay beside me. His eyes were half opened, and with his parted lips, looking blue in the morning light, his hollow cheeks and sunken temples, I thought for a moment, until aware of some slight sign of breathing, that he must have died during the night. Captain Bligh sat in the stern, beside Elphinstone, who held the tiller. Although reduced, like the rest of us, to skin and bone, and clad, like ourselves, in sodden rags, there was nothing grotesque in his appearance. Wear what he might, he was still a noble figure, and suffering but added to the dignity and firmness of his bearing.