Sublime

Breakfast, with Dundas giving Jack a circumstantial account of his exchange and of the privateer and insisting on a rehearsal of the action with Linois, was a long, rambling meal, with dishes pushed aside and pieces of toast representing ships, which Jack manoeuvred with his left hand, holding Sophia’s under the table with his right, and showing th

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He looked hard over the sea at the distant corvette: she vanished in a drift of rain, and he shifted his gaze to the two-decker. What was in Linois’s mind? He was running east-south-east under easy sail: topsails, forecourse clewed up. One thing Jack was certain of was, that Linois was infinitely more concerned with catching the China fleet than wi

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Certainly it was delightful for the passengers, the smooth sea, the invigorating breeze carrying them steadily into warmer airs; but in the latitude of the Isle of France Jack, his carpenter and boatswain, and all his seamanlike officers, looked out eagerly for a French privateer – a spare topmast or so, a few spars, a hundred fathoms of one-and-a-

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Still higher; and Jack swarmed round the mast, up into the cross-trees, and heaved Stephen’s now submissive body into place, passed a line round it, and called upon him to open his eyes. ‘Why, this is superb,’ he cried, convulsively hugging the mast. They were poised high above the surface of the sea; and all that was visible of the distant, narrow

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