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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I shall not speak of the flogging of Young, nor tell how Skinner’s back was cut to ribbons with two dozen at the gangway. It is enough to say that Young was a different man from that day on, performing his duties sullenly and in silence, and avoiding the other midshipmen in the berth. He informed me long afterwards that, had events turned out differently, it was his intention to resign from the Service on the ship’s arrival in England, and call Bligh to account as man to man.

On the fourth of September, with a fine spanking breeze at northwest, we weighed anchor and sailed out of Adventure Bay. Seven weeks later, after an uneventful passage made miserable by an outbreak of scurvy and the constant state of starvation to which we were reduced, I saw my first South Sea island.

We had gotten our easting in the high southern latitudes, and once in the trade winds we made a long board to the north on the starboard tack. We were well into the tropics now and in the vicinity of land. Man-of-war hawks hovered overhead, their long forked tails opening and shutting like scissor-blades; shoals of flying fish rose under the ship’s cutwater to skim away and plunge into the sea like whiffs of grapeshot. The sea was of the pale turquoise blue only to be seen within the tropics, shading to purple here and there where clouds obscured the sun. The roll of the Pacific from east to west was broken by the labyrinth of low coral islands to the east of us,—the vast cluster of half-drowned lands called by the natives Paumotu,—and the Bounty sailed a tranquil sea.