E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Looking Seaward Again
By
Sir WALTER RUNCIMAN, Bart.,
Author of The Shellback's Progress,
Windjammers and Sea Tramps, etc.
LONDON:
WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO. LTD.
1907.
Dodging under the Land
TO
MY WIFE
THESE FRAGMENTS
ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE.
The following tales have been told to some few men and women by the fireside. The stories themselves only claim to be unvarnished matters of fact; and I may repeat here what I said in a previous volume, that my object has not been to strain after literary effect or style. My too early desertion of home-life to graduate in the harsh and whimsical discipline of sailing-vessels in the days when they had still some years to live and "carry on" ere steam took the wind out of their sails, precluded such studies as are natural to the embryo man of letters. But the circumstances that told against mere study did not prevent my preserving many memories of my sojourns ashore and voyages in distant seas. I mention this fact, not as an apology, but as an explanation which I hope may commend itself to the amiable reader.
WALTER RUNCIMAN.
3rd December 1907.
CONTENTS.
| PREFACE. |
| Through Torpedoes and Ice |
| Fair Trade and Foul Play |
| Smugglers of the Rock |
| A Pasha before Plevna |
| A Russian Port in the 'Sixties |
| "Dutchy" and his Chief |
Through Torpedoes and Ice
"Osman the Victorious," as Skobeleff called the matchless Turkish pasha, had kept the Russian hordes at bay for one hundred and forty-two days. Never in the annals of warfare had the world beheld such unexpected military genius, combined with stubborn endurance, as was shown during the siege of Plevna. On December 10th, 1877, Osman came out and made a desperate struggle to break through the Russian lines; but after four hours' hard fighting the Turks sent up the white flag, and boisterous cheering swelled over the snow-clad land when it became known that the greatest Turkish general of modern times had surrendered. His little army of Bashi-Bazouks had annihilated more than one Siberian battalion. The Russian loss was forty thousand, and the Turkish thirty thousand. Had Suleiman and the other Turkish generals shown the same stubborn spirit as Osman, the Russian army would never have been permitted to cross the Balkans, much less reach Constantinop