Our progress was very slow, for, as you will easily understand, and must have noted scores of times in connection with some wreck, a ship is of immense weight, and, even if moving ever so slowly, touching a rock at the bottom means a tremendous grinding crash, and either the vessel fixed, perhaps without the possibility of removal, or a hole made which will soon cause it to sink. Navigation, then, is beset with dangers for a captain. If he is in well-known waters, matters are simple enough; every rock will be marked upon his chart, every mile near shore will have been sounded, and he will know to a foot or two how much water is beneath his keel. But as soon as he ventures up some strange creek or river, paradoxically speaking, “he is at sea.” In other words, he would be journeying haphazard, if the greatest precautions were not taken.
These precautions were soon taken, a couple of boats being sent on ahead with a man in each taking soundings, while we had this advantage—we were journeying with a rising tide, and the river naturally grew deeper and deeper.
But we encountered no difficulty; we steamed on just fast enough to give the vessel steerage way, while the boats went on, the leads were heaved, and the result was always the same; plenty of water, and so soft and muddy a bottom, that even if we had gone aground, all that would have happened would have been a little delay while we waited for the tide to lift us off.
The course of the river was so winding that we could not see far ahead. Hence it was that a careful look-out was kept as we rounded each bend, expecting at every turn to see a kind of port to which the piratical junks resorted, and with a village, if not a town, upon the shore. But we went on and on without success, the river, if anything, growing wider, till all at once, as we were slowly gliding round a bend, leaving a thick track of black smoke in the misty morning air, one of the men in the top hailed the deck.
“Sail ho, sir!”
“Where away?”
“Dead astarn, sir!”
“What?”
“Dead astarn, sir!”
Two of the men near me burst into a laugh, which they tried to hide as the first lieutenant looked sharply round. But there, sure enough, were the tops of the junk’s masts dead astern, for the course of the river proved to be just there almost exactly like that piece of twisted flat wire which ladies fasten on the backs of their dresses, and call an eye; the great stream forming first a small circle, and then going right away to form the large loop of the eye, while the junks were lying at the far side of the loop, so that to reach them where they lay, right across an open plain about two miles in width, we had to sail for some distance right away, apparently leaving them right behind.