Word: aboard
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...Later that day, spirits aboard the Brunswick and the nine vessels grouped around her rose still higher. The men had spotted a flotilla of five small boats, dispatched from the steamer, coming toward them. It seemed that the promised passage out of the Bering Strait was about to be delivered. But, as the boats came into clearer view, the sailors gathered on the decks of the awaiting whaleships noticed that the approaching craft carried uniformed Confederate Navy officers. Moreover, almost simultaneously, the whaling seamen heard a warning shot fired in their direction from the steamer, and noticed that the Stars...
...other whaling vessels answering the Brunswick's distress flag arrived, each vessel's master-as captains of commercial ships are usually called-came aboard to survey the damage. And each, in turn, concurred that the listing ship was a lost cause. They also agreed with Captain Potter that his only recourse was to fall back on the general custom under the circumstances: condemn the ship and auction off her cargo, whaleboats and whatever gear that could be hauled off the vessel. At the least, the Brunswick's master could reduce some of the losses to his ship's owner...
...Still others aboard the gathered whaleships speculated that that the approaching steamer might be the Confederate raider that had, amid great controversy, stopped in Melbourne the previous winter. Over the past four years of war, the Confederates had dispatched at least twelve such cruisers into the world's oceans, charging them with destroying private, unarmed Union merchant, fishing, and whaling vessels. But the war was over. Weeks ago these sailors, when variously docked in San Francisco, Honolulu and other ports, had read in newspapers that the war between the North and the South had ended nearly three months earlier...
...steamer had come within hailing range, one of the Confederates shouted to the men gathered on the decks of the ten whaling vessels: as of that moment, all of their ships and cargoes were prizes of the CSS Shenandoah. The Confederates ordered the more than three-hundred men aboard the whaling vessels-each carried a crew of up to thirty-five-to surrender and come aboard the Shenandoah as prisoners of war. Failing that, they could go down with their vessels, all of which the Confederates threatened to destroy. Alarm rippled across the decks of the whalers. Officers...
...futile hope. Unusually for this season and place, it was a windless day: no sailing vessels would be going anywhere quickly. And, in the end, the whaleships' masters aboard their unarmed vessels had little choice but to comply with the Confederates, who that day and for the past few weeks, had stubbornly refused to believe the reports that had reached them of the war's end. Indeed, the master of the William Thompson, one of the captured whalers, recalled that a Confederate officer "exultantly stated that he did not believe Lee had surrendered...