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PinkMonkey.com-Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson




23. The Ebb-tide Runs

THE coracle--as I had ample reason to know before I was
done with her--was a very safe boat for a person of my
height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a sea-way;
but she was the most cross-grained, lop-sided craft to manage. Do
as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else,
and turning round and round was the manoeuvre she was best at.
Even Ben Gunn himself has admitted that she was “queer to
handle till you knew her way.”

Certainly I did not know her way. She turned in every direction
but the one I was bound to go; the most part of the time we were
broadside on, and I am very sure I never should have made the
ship at all but for the tide. By good fortune, paddle as I pleased,
the tide was still sweeping me down; and there lay the Hispaniola
right in the fairway, hardly to be missed.

First she loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker
than darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and
the next moment, as it seemed (for, the farther I went, the brisker
grew the current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser and
had laid hold.

The hawser was as taut as a bowstring, and the current so
strong she pulled upon her anchor. All round the hull, in the
blackness, the rippling current bubbled and chattered like a little
mountain stream. One cut with my sea-gully and the Hispaniola
would go humming down the tide.

So far so good, but it next occurred to my recollection that a
taut hawser, suddenly cut, is a thing as dangerous as a kicking

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