Swallows and Amazons. Arthur Ransome

took his place in the bows. Titty sat on the middle thwart. John hooked the yard to the traveller on the mast, and hauled up the little brown sail and made the halyard fast. Titty’s flag, with the dark blue swallow on a white ground, was already at the masthead. Titty had hoisted it herself as soon as they had stepped the mast after breakfast. John went aft to the tiller. Susan pulled down the boom until the sail was setting properly, when she too made fast.

      THE START OF THE VOYAGE

      There was a very light north-westerly wind, brought, no doubt, by the urgent whistling of the crew. Mother held the end of the painter, and then when the little sail filled, she threw it to Roger who coiled it down, and stuffed it away under his feet. Very slowly the Swallow slid away from the jetty.

      “Good-bye, mother. Good-bye, Vicky. Good-bye, nurse.”

      “Good-bye, good-bye,” came from the jetty.

      Mother waved her handkerchief. Nurse waved hers, and

      Vicky waved a fat hand.

      The crew of the Swallow waved back.

      “Three cheers for the stay-at-homes,” called Captain John.

      They cheered.

      “We ought to sing ‘Spanish Ladies’,” said Titty. So they sang:

      “Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies,

      Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain,

      For we’re under orders for to sail to old England,

      And we may never see you fair ladies again.

      “So we’ll rant and we’ll roar, like true British sailors,

      We’ll range and we’ll roam over all the salt seas,

      Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England,

      From Ushant to Scilly ‘tis thirty-five leagues.”

      “Of course, really, we’re going the other way,” said Susan, “but it doesn’t matter.”

      The Swallow slipped slowly out towards the mouth of the bay. She made at first no noise and hardly any wake. Then, as she came clear of the northerly side of the bay, she found a little more wind, and the cheerful lapping noise began under her forefoot, while her wake lengthened out and bubbled astern of her.

      Darien, the promontory on the southern side of the Holly Howe Bay, was longer than the promontory on the northern side. Also Captain John was taking no risks. At the end of Darien there might be rocks. He held on straight out of the bay until he could see into the bay on the other side of the point. Far away down the lake the island showed. It seemed further than it had from the top of Darien. At last John let out the main sheet, and put the helm up. The boom swung out, the Swallow swung round and, with the wind aft, John steered straight for the island.

      Mother and nurse, with Vicky, were still on the jetty. They gave a last wave. The whole crew of the Swallow waved back, and then in a moment they could see into the bay no longer. The bay was hidden behind Darien. Above them was the Peak from which they had first seen the island. The Peak itself seemed lower than it had. Everything had grown smaller except the lake, and that had never seemed so large before.

      “Are we all right about jibing?” asked Mate Susan, remembering a sad day the year before when, running before the wind in another small boat, the boom had jibed over with sudden decision, and given her a bump that had lasted for a long time.

      “Look at the flag,” said Captain John. “It’s blowing well over on the same side as the sail. There’s no fear of a jibe so long as it’s doing that.”

      The wind was steady, though light, and on the whole John was glad that there was no more of it on this first voyage to the island with the heavily laden Swallow. Reefing would have been a terrible nuisance, with the boat so full of tents and biscuit boxes and cooking things. Besides, there was so much to see that looked different now that it was seen from the water instead of from the Peak of Darien.

      The island was not in the middle of the lake, but much nearer to the eastern shore, on the same side of the lake as Holly Howe and Darien. Along that shore was one little promontory after another. Here and there was a field by the water’s edge, but mostly there were thick woods. Here and there among the trees were houses, but not many of them, and above the trees were the heather-covered slopes of the hills.

      As they passed the second cape beyond Darien, Roger, the look-out, reported a ship, and pointed towards the shore. The sail was on that side, so that Roger saw it before the others. In the bay beyond the cape lay a strange-looking dark blue vessel. She was a long narrow craft with a high raised cabin roof, and a row of glass windows along her side. Her bows were like the bows of an old-time clipper. Her stern was like that of a steamship. She had nothing that could properly be called a mast, though there was a little flagstaff, where a mast might have been, stepped just forward of the glass-windowed cabin. There was an awning over her after-deck, and under it a big fat man was sitting writing in a deck-chair. The vessel was moored to a large buoy.

      “It’s a houseboat,” said John.

      “What is a houseboat?” asked Titty.

      “It’s a boat used instead of a house. There was one at Falmouth, where people used to live all the year round.”

      “I wish we lived in a boat all the year round,” said Susan.

      “I shall some day,” said John, “and so will Roger. Father does.”

      “Yes, but that’s different. A destroyer isn’t a houseboat.”

      “You live in it just the same.”

      “Yes, but you don’t stay in one place. A houseboat sticks in one place like a boathouse. I remember the houseboat at Falmouth too,” said Susan. “There was a whole family living in it, and we used to see them rowing ashore for milk in the mornings. The butcher and the baker used to call there, just as if it was a house. They used to come to the shore and shout ‘Houseboat ahoy!’ and then the man or the woman used to row ashore to buy meat and bread from them. Look out what you’re doing, John!”

      Captain John, with his mind on the houseboat, had not been thinking about his steering, and the little white flag with the blue swallow on it was fluttering on the side of the mast away from the sail. The boom was just going to swing over when Susan called, but John, putting the helm down instantly, just saved a jibe. After that he looked at the houseboat only out of the corner of his eye. The wind was so light that a jibe would not have mattered much, except perhaps to bumped heads, but it would hardly have done for the captain of the ship to have set an example of such bad steering to his crew.

      Able-seaman Titty had wedged herself in the bottom of the boat between the tent bundles with a basket of small crockery in her arms for safety’s sake. She could just see over the gunwale.

      “I wonder,” she said, “if the man on the houseboat has his family with him.”

      “He’s all alone,” said Roger.

      “The others may be cooking in the cabin,” said Susan.

      “He’s probably a retired pirate,” said Titty.

      Just then a harsh squawk sounded over the water, and a large green bird which they had not noticed shook itself where it stood perched on the rail that ran round the stern of the houseboat.

      “He is a pirate,” said Roger. “There’s his parrot.”

      Before they could see any more the next little cape hid the houseboat from them. This was perhaps lucky, because even Captain John wanted to see the parrot, and good steering is impossible when you are looking two ways at once.

      “Steamship coming up astern,” said Mate Susan.

      A