Our instructions were to lie at St. Jago, until three British ships, then loading, were ready for sea, and then to convey them through the Caicos, or windward passage.  As our stay was therefore likely to be ten days or a fortnight at the shortest, the boats were hoisted out, and we made our little arrangements and preparations for taking all the recreation in our power, and our worthy skipper, taught and stiff as he was at sea, always encouraged all kinds of fun and larking, both amongst the men and the officers on occasions like the present.  Amongst his other pleasant qualities, he was a great boat-racer, constantly building and altering gigs, and pulling-boats, at his own expense, and matching the men against each other for small prizes.  He had just finished what the old carpenter considered his chef-d’oeuvre, and a curious affair this same masterpiece was.  In the first place it was forty-two feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam—­the planking was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one of the crew had slipped his foot off the stretcher, it must have gone through the bottom.  There was a standing order that no man was to go into it with shoes on.  She was to pull six oars, and her crew were the captains of the tops, the primest seamen in the ship, and the steersman no less a character than the skipper himself.

Her name, for I love to be particular, was the Dragon-fly; she was painted out and in of a bright red, amounting to a flame colour—­oars red—­the men wearing trousers and shirts of red flannel, and red net night caps—­which common uniform the captain himself wore, I think I have said before, that he was a very handsome man, and when he had taken his seat, and the gigs, all fine men, were seated each with his oar held upright upon his knees ready to be dropped into the water at the same instant, the craft and her crew formed to my eye as pretty a plaything for grown children as ever was seen.  “Give way, men,” the oars dipped as clean as so many knives, without a sparkle, the gallant fellows stretched out, and away shot the Dragon-fly, like an arrow, the green water foaming into white smoke at the bows, and hissing away in her wake.

She disappeared in a twinkling round a reach of the canal where we were anchored, and we, that is the gunroom-officers, all except the second lieutenant, who had the watch, and the master, now got into our own gig also, rowed by ourselves, and away we all went in a covey; the purser and doctor, and three of the middies forward, Thomas Cringle, gent., pulling the stroke oar, with old Moses Yerk as coxswain;—­and as the Dragon-flies were all red, so we were all sea-green, boat, oars, trousers, shirts, and night-caps.  The strain was between the Devil’s Darning Needle and our boat, the Watersprite, which was making capital play, for although we had not the bottom of the topmen, yet we had more blood, so to speak, and we had already beaten them, in their last gig, all to sticks.  But the Dragon-fly was a new boat, and now in the water for the first time. * * *