United States or Rwanda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Why should I blush to own it when the gipsy, after all, junked an old rich goutified coffee planter at the eleventh hour, and married me, and is now the mother of half a dozen little Cringles or so?
Their dreams are of cringles and reef-tackles, of knots, splices, grummets, and dead-eyes. They can tell the length, to a fathom, of every rope in the boatswain's warrant, from the flying jib down-haul to the spanker-sheet; and the height of every spar, from the main-top-gallant truck to the heel of the lower mast.
Before I set sail, however, I was married to my cousin Mary in Jamaica; and when we got to Old England, where the Lotus Leaf was paid off, I settled for a time on shore, the happiest, etc., until some years afterwards, when the wee Cringles began to tumble home so fast that I had to cut and run, and once more betake myself to the salt sea. The Antiquary
To feel all that and the rest of it to walk to the tops of your shoes in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and gaffs for yourself if you weren't sure who were going to spread the big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers, bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn't to stay so white forever to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so they'd stay, for by and by men's lives would depend on the way they hung on all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive with men jumping to their work skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers, lumpers, all thinking, talking, and, I suppose, dreaming of the season's work ahead m-m there was life for a man!
They are used in hauling the corners of the sail up when they are to be reefed or furled. The buntlines are two ropes attached to cringles, or eyes, in the bottom of the sail, which are used for hauling up the middle, or bunt, of the topsail.
Word Of The Day