One of them in the end proved a traitor outright; few of the rest were reliable.
As for the ships, that commanded by Paul in person will be a good example of the fleet.

She was an old Indiaman, clumsy and crank, smelling strongly of the savor of tea, cloves, and arrack, the cargoes of former voyages.

Even at that day she was, from her venerable grotesqueness, what a cocked hat is, at the present age, among ordinary beavers.

Her elephantine bulk was houdahed with a castellated poop like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Poor Israel, standing on the top of this poop, spy-glass at his eye, looked more an astronomer than a mariner, having to do, not with the mountains of the billows, but the mountains in the moon.