turned like so many S's to the sea; on the north was the passage by
which we had come, that which led to the sea by way of the bar. But
there was to be no crossing of the bar for us that night. Ten miles
inland we had smelled that sea-breeze and knew what it meant; but
Captain Blaise, nevertheless, held on with the _Bess_ toward the bar. We
could hear their crews paddling off and shouting their messages of our
progress until they were forced by the breakers to go ashore. Their
parting triumphant shouts was their word of our sure intent to attempt
the passage of the bar.

When all was quiet from their direction, we put back to the lagoon and
headed for the river passage. But one ship of any size had ventured this
river passage in a generation, and the planking of that one, the brig
_Orion_, for years lay on the bank by way of a warning. "But the _Orion_
was no _Dancing Bess_," commented Captain Blaise. Surely not, nor was
her master a Captain Blaise.

The top spars of the _Bess_ had been slung while we were ashore, and by
this time we had also knocked away the ugly and hindering false work on
bow and stern, so that with her lifting foreyards which would have done
for a sloop-of-war, and on her driving fore and aft sails which could
have served the mizzen of a two-thousand-ton bark, the _Bess_ was now
herself again. And she had need to be for the work before her.

Captain Blaise ordered her foresails brailed in to the mast to windward
and her foreyards braced flat, this that she might sail closer to the
wind.

Entering the narrow passage, she was held to the edge of the low but
steep bank to windward; so close that where the low-lying reeds grew