Ambrose Nast
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I paced back and forth across the sand, waves rolling lazily up to my boots.
At long last, the oarsman came ashore, pulling the boat behind him.
"'marching easily enough through the shin-high water.
"'I reached a hand out when he was close enough "'and he seized me firmly by the forearm instead.
"'He was tall and broad-shouldered, "'his hair blown chaotically in the wind, "'showing glints of grey in the weak firelight.
Impossibly, in neither his countenance nor his posture nor his voice, did he display the slightest sign of being out of breath after his labors on the water.
His greeting was gentlemanly but quite subdued.
His gaze was pale and rather icy, exuding no particular amity.
He told me the ship would come no closer for fear of hull damage that made scraping a shoal too dangerous.
He sought merely a meal and to perhaps describe the ship's current malady to some talented shipwright to determine if it was safe to push onward toward Nantucket Sound and point south.
His hull carried barley, black pepper, and hemp, with sixteen men under his charge aboard ship.
His accent suggested he was from the Netherlands, though his English was excellent.
I told him I could take him to the harbor office and there he could report his cargo.
He protested quietly that surely his arrival on shore without the ship itself precluded that legal necessity.
Visibly displeased, he looked at me long and silent.
Who is she who built the fire, he asked me, who I saw from the ship?
With much hesitation, I told him that it was a local girl who should not have been out.