We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
236 The Sea Gypsy
in the sand bar, while the ship floats clear. Only if it is now low tide, and the tide is coming in, have we a chance in a thousand of finding an opening out through the bar at dawn ; if the tide is high and running out, we can never make it.
But there is not time to think of that now, for the ship is being blown farther shoreward. So: "Let go the anchor." They heave up that five-hundred-pound anchor from the shocks as if it were a thistle, and over she goes and down she goes — and holds.
For the moment we are safe, for the sand bar breaks the heavy surf, and here inside the bar is only a deep swell, but even this swell lets the Wisdom down on the bottom with terrific crashes. The stern is taking the heaviest blows, so we pump our drinking water, which is in the after compartments, over the side, and shift the stores from the lazaret to the forecastle deck.
There is nothing to do now, but shoot distress rockets — which fizzle dismally — and wait for the dawn, and hope.
On the shore a light nickered along the sands. And I remembered what I had been told at Aden by men whose business it was to sail the Arabian coast. "It's a damned bad place to be wrecked on," they said. ' ' The Bedouins will do you in for the loot on your ship without the slightest compunction if they think they can get away with it."
So I ordered Cooper and Dresser, the Dane, to get the guns ready, and Schoedsack to solder up the mo