Some flatboats

Usage examples of barges.

In many places it is too shallow to float even the great flat-bottomed barges and, more inmportantly, a path for them would have to be cut and chopped, foot by foot, through the thickets of rush and sedge, and the tangles of marsh vine.

With a slave knife he cut the rence tunic from her and threw her, still partly tangled in the net, over his shoulder, and carried her toward one of the dark, high-prowed barges in hte shadows at the edge of the island.

The slaves who were loading the barges would then gather up each new slave, carrying him to the barges, adding him to the others.

The slaves of the men of Port Kar then separated the nets, rolling them, then folding them, then placing them on the barges.

In marsh barges there is no time-beater, or keleustes, but the count to the oarsmen is given by mouth, by one spoken o fas the oar-master.

Two other slaves stood forward with glaves, lighter poles, bladed, with which they cut a path for the following barges.

That path must needs be wide enough for the beam of the barges, and the width of the stroke of the oars.

The officer, angrily, was shouting the length of the barge to its oar-master, who now stood on the tiller deck, looking back toward the other barges, his hands on the sternrail.

Counting the kills, and other men we had seen, the barges’ hulls, there might be some fifty men left, spread over the six barges.

This was to prevent given barges from being boarded separately, where the warriors on one could not come to the aid of the other.

If boarding were attepmpted toward the center of the line, the boarding party could thus be crushed on both flanks by warriors pouring in from adjacent barges.

Always keeping us shielded by thickets of rush and sedge, she circled the six barges, fastened together.

I expected that some of those dead on the barges had been, by their own kind, denied such a place.

On the second prow of the six barges, only a few feet from the tiller dec of the first barge, it had been the tall, gray-eyed girl, who had held marsh vine against my arm, she who had danced with such secruciating slowness before me at the pole.

I was angry only that I myself had not stripped her and beaten her, and made her a miserable slave as soon as we had come to the barges.