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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“Thank ’ee, sir. I’ve a cut of fish for Jack; I’ll just hang it up in the shade.”

“He left not ten minutes gone. Come in and rest before we dine. They’ll be giving us some of your fish. Do you like it raw, in the Indian style?”

“Aye, sir, that I do!”

“And I, when prepared with their sauce of coconut. We think of the Indians as savages, yet we have much to learn from them.”

“I don’t know what we’d do without ’em, here. We’d get no fish without the men to teach us how to catch ’em, and as for the girls, I reckon we’d starve but for them!”

They were sitting by the table in Christian’s room, for Maimiti could no longer climb the ladder to the apartment upstairs, and the dining room was set aside for her use. The two men were silent for a time while the chronometer beside them ticked loudly and steadily. Christian glanced at its dial, which registered the hour in Greenwich, and the sight set his thoughts to wandering back through the past—to his boyhood in Cumberland and on the Isle of Man, to his early days at sea.