I Was Still On
Shore When It Came Out, And He Has Been Busy Explaining Ever Since.
And the time continued to go by.
One thing was becoming apparent,
namely, that it was impossible to finish the Snark in San Francisco.
She had been so long in the building that she was beginning to break
down and wear out. In fact, she had reached the stage where she was
breaking down faster than she could be repaired. She had become a
joke. Nobody took her seriously; least of all the men who worked on
her. I said we would sail just as she was and finish building her
in Honolulu. Promptly she sprang a leak that had to be attended to
before we could sail. I started her for the boat-ways. Before she
got to them she was caught between two huge barges and received a
vigorous crushing. We got her on the ways, and, part way along, the
ways spread and dropped her through, stern-first, into the mud.
It was a pretty tangle, a job for wreckers, not boat-builders.
There are two high tides every twenty-four hours, and at every high
tide, night and day, for a week, there were two steam tugs pulling
and hauling on the Snark. There she was, stuck, fallen between the
ways and standing on her stern. Next, and while still in that
predicament, we started to use the gears and castings made in the
local foundry whereby power was conveyed from the engine to the
windlass.
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