The Land of Fire, A Tale of Adventure

Thomas Mayne Reid

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Excerpt: A ship tempest-tossed, labouring amid the surges of an angry sea; her crew on the alert, doing their utmost to keep her ...

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Excerpt: A ship tempest-tossed, labouring amid the surges of an angry sea; her crew on the alert, doing their utmost to keep her off a lee-shore. And such a shore! None more dangerous on all ocean?s edge; for it is the west coast of Tierra del Fuego, abreast the Fury Isles and that long belt of seething breakers known to mariners as the ?Milky Way,? the same of which the great naturalist, Darwin, has said: ?One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about shipwreck, peril, and death.? There is no landsman in the ship now exposed to its dangers. All on board are familiar with the sea?have spent years upon it. Yet is there fear in their hearts and pallor on their cheeks, as their eyes turn to that belt of white frothy water between them and the land, trending north and south beyond the range of vision. Technically speaking, the endangered vessel is not a ship, but a barque, as betokened by the fore-and-aft rig of her mizenmast. Nor is she of large dimensions; only some six or seven hundred tons. But the reader knows this already, or will, after learning her name. As her stern swings up on the billow, there can be read upon it the Calypso; and she is that Calypso in which Henry Chester sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour to make his first acquaintance with a sea life.?