“And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they
might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big
companies of phantoms. The ship’s crews worked as spectrally and
nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of
the boats would permit. Small steamboats, each with a swerving tail
made up of barges and small boats, panted alongside the transports and
battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships
spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands
of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out
whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.”
[Illustration:
_© New York Herald._