The latter, a species of craft, however, much
less common in the waters of Italy than in the Bay of Biscay and the
British Channel, was the construction of the vessel in question; a
circumstance that the mariners who eyed her from the shores of Elba
deemed indicative of mischief. A three-masted lugger, that spread a wide
breadth of canvas, with a low, dark hull, relieved by a single and
almost imperceptible line of red beneath her channels, and a waist so
deep that nothing was visible above it but the hat of some mariner
taller than common, was considered a suspicious vessel; and not even a
fisherman would have ventured out within reach of a shot, so long as her
character was unknown. Privateers, or corsairs, as it was the fashion to
term them (and the name, with even its English signification, was often
merited by their acts), not unfrequently glided down that coast; and it
was sometimes dangerous for those who belonged to friendly nations to
meet them, in moments when the plunder that a relic of barbarism still
legalizes had failed.
The lugger was actually of about one hundred and eighty tons
admeasurement, but her dark paint and low hull gave her an appearance of
being much smaller than she really was; still, the spread of her canvas,
as she came down before the wind, wing-and-wing, as seamen term it, or
with a sail fanning like the heavy pinions of a sea-fowl, on each side,
betrayed her pursuits; and, as has been intimated, the mariners on the
shore who watched her movements shook their heads in distrust as they
communed among themselves, in very indifferent Italian, concerning her
destination and object.
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