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- 4307
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.591Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4242
- text
- foremost, to Hades; sinking her, and sowing her barley in the sea
broadcast by a broadside. From her crew he learned that there was a
fleet of twenty or thirty sail at anchor in Lochryan, with an armed
brigantine. He pointed his prow thither; but at the mouth of the lock,
the wind turned against him again in hard squalls. He abandoned the
project. Shortly after, he encountered a sloop from Dublin. He sunk her
to prevent intelligence.
Thus, seeming as much to bear the elemental commission of Nature, as
the military warrant of Congress, swarthy Paul darted hither and
thither; hovering like a thundercloud off the crowded harbors; then,
beaten off by an adverse wind, discharging his lightnings on
uncompanioned vessels, whose solitude made them a more conspicuous and
easier mark, like lonely trees on the heath. Yet all this while the
land was full of garrisons, the embayed waters full of fleets. With the
impunity of a Levanter, Paul skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart
of the supreme naval power of earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly
swallowed by Britain in a draught of old ocean, and making sad havoc
with her vitals.
Seeing next a large vessel steering for the Clyde, he gave chase,
hoping to cut her off. The stranger proving a fast sailer, the pursuit
was urged on with vehemence, Paul standing, plank-proud, on the
quarter-deck, calling for pulls upon every rope, to stretch each
already half-burst sail to the uttermost.
While thus engaged, suddenly a shadow, like that thrown by an eclipse,
was seen rapidly gaining along the deck, with a sharp defined line,
plain as a seam of the planks. It involved all before it. It was the
domineering shadow of the Juan Fernandez-like crag of Ailsa. The Ranger
was in the deep water which makes all round and close up to this great
summit of the submarine Grampians.
The crag, more than a mile in circuit, is over a thousand feet high,
eight miles from the Ayrshire shore. There stands the cove, lonely as a
foundling, proud as Cheops. But, like the battered brains surmounting
the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle,
in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless
phantoms, thronging the soul of some ruinous genius, who, even in
overthrow, harbors none but lofty conceptions.
As the Ranger shot higher under the crag, its height and bulk dwarfed
both pursuer and pursued into nutshells. The main-truck of the Ranger
was nine hundred feet below the foundations of the ruin on the crag’s
top:
While the ship was yet under the shadow, and each seaman’s face shared
in the general eclipse, a sudden change came over Paul. He issued no
more sultanical orders. He did not look so elate as before. At length
he gave the command to discontinue the chase. Turning about, they
sailed southward.
“Captain Paul,” said Israel, shortly afterwards, “you changed your mind
rather queerly about catching that craft. But you thought she was
drawing us too far up into the land, I suppose.”
“Sink the craft,” cried Paul; “it was not any fear of her, nor of King
George, which made me turn on my heel; it was yon cock of the walk.”
“Cock of the walk?”
“Aye, cock of the walk of the sea; look—yon Crag of Ailsa.”
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