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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They had no further speech for some time; then Christian said: “There is something I have long wanted to ask you. ... Give me your candid opinion.... Is it possible, do you think, that Bligh and the men with him could have survived?”

Young gave him a quick glance. “I have waited for that question,” he replied. “The matter is not one I have felt free to open, but I have been tempted to do so more than once.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“That there is reason to believe them safe.”

Christian turned to him abruptly. “Say it again, Ned! Make me believe it! But, no.... What do I ask? Could nineteen men, unarmed, scantly provided with food and water, crowded to the point of foundering in a ship’s boat, make a voyage of full twelve hundred leagues? Through archipelagoes peopled with savages who would ask nothing better than to murder them at sight? Impossible!”

“It is by no means impossible if you consider the character of the man who leads them,” Young replied, quietly. “Remember his uncanny skill as a navigator; his knowledge of the sea; his prodigious memory. I doubt whether there is a known island in the Pacific, or the fragment of one, whose precise latitude and longitude he does not carry in his head. Above all, Christian, remember his stubborn, unconquerable will. And whatever we may think of him otherwise, you will agree that, with a vessel under him, though it be nothing but a ship’s launch, Bligh is beyond praise.”