e dared; and Gadabout crept
cautiously up to one of the stakes, so as not to knock it over, and was
tied to it. Then, the Commodore went ashore and arranged to have the
gasoline brought out to us.

Presently, two negroes rolled the barrel into a lighter. They poled
their awkward craft out to Gadabout and made fast to a cleat. It took a
long time to pump the gasoline into cans, and then to strain it into
our tank on the upper deck. The day was about over. Relinquishing our
plan of visiting Brandon, we ran back to our Chippoak harbour, and our
anchor went to bed in the creek as the sun went down.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE PIER MARKED "BRANDON"

It was late on the following afternoon when Gadabout was out of the
creek, out in the river, and bound for the little pier marked
_Brandon_.

A belated steamboat was swashing down stream, and a schooner, having
but little of wind and less of tide to help it along, was rocking
listlessly in the long swell. In the shadow of the slack sails a man
sprawled upon the schooner's deck, while against the old-fashioned
tiller another leaned lazily.

Gadabout had to make quite a detour to get around some shad-net poles
before she could head in toward the Brandon wharf; and her roundabout
course gave time for a thought or two upon the famous old river
plantation.

Starting but a few years after those first colonists landed at
Jamestown Island, the story of Brandon is naturally a long one. But,
working on the scale of a few words to a century, we may get the gist
of it in here.

Among those first settlers was one Captain John Martin, a considerable
figure of those days and a member of the Council appointed by the King
for the government of the colony. He seems to have been the only man
who believed in holding on at James Towne after the horrors of the
"Starving Time." He made vigorous protest when the settlers took to the
ships and abandoned the settlement.

About 1616, he secured a grant of several thousand acres of land in the
neighbourhood of this creek that we were now lying in, and the estate
became known as Brandon--Martin's Brandon. The terms of the grant were
so unusually favourable that they came near making the Captain a little
lord in the wilderness. He was to "enjoye his landes in as large and
ample manner to all intentes and purposes as any Lord of any Manours in
England dothe holde his grounde." And he certainly started out to do
it.

But soon the General Assembly