Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Lady of Lynn
The Lady of Lynn was a three-masted, full-rigged ship of 380 tons, a stout and strong-built craft, not afraid of the Bay at its worst and wildest, making her six knots an hour with a favourable breeze, therefore not one of your broad, slow Dutch merchantmen, which creep slowly, like Noah's ark, over the face of the waters. Yet She Was full in the beam, and capacious in the hold the more you put into her the steadier she sat and the steadier she sailed.
Man and boy I sailed in the Lady of Lynn for twenty-five years, and I ought to know. We made, for the most part, two, but sometimes three, voyages in the year, unless we experienced bad weather, and had to go into dock. Bad weather there is in plenty storms and chopping winds in the Bay, beating up the Channel against east winds. Things are always uncertain in the North Sea. Sometimes the ship will be tacking day after day, getting a knot or two in four-and-twenty hours, and sometimes she will be two or three weeks crossing the Wash, which, as everybody knows, is cumbered with shallows, and making way up the Ouse, where a wind from the south or south-east will keep a ship from reaching her port for days together. To be sure, a sailor pays very little heed to the loss of a few days. It matters little to him whether he is working on board or in port. He is a patient creature, who waits all his life upon a favourable breeze. And since he has no power over the wind and the sea, he accepts whatever comes without murmuring, and makes the best of it. Perhaps the wind blows up into a gale, and the gale into a storm - perhaps the good ship founders with all hands - nobody pities the sailor - it is all in the day's work - young or old, everyone must die - the wife at home knows that, as well as the man at sea. She knew it when she married her husband. I have read of Turks and pagan Mohammedans that they have no fear or care about the future, believing that they cannot change what is predestined. It seems to me a foolish doctrine, because if we want anything we must work for it, or we shall not get it, fate or no fate. But the nearest to the Turks in this respect is our English sailor, who will work his hardest in the worst gale that ever blew.
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