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This fore-top-man paid eighteen pence per link for the cable, besides being on the smart the whole cruise, suffering the effects of his repeated puncturings; so he paid very dear for his cable.
That night the messmates of the fore-top-man endeavored, in vain, to extract from him the particulars of his excursion with the captain; though the direct answers to their home questions were only evaded by allusions so dark and ambiguous, as to give to that superstitious feeling of the crew, which Ludlow had wished to lull, twice its original force.
"I tell you what it is, shippies!" cried the old captain of gun No. 1 on the forecastle, "if that 'ere President of ourn don't luff up into the wind, by the Battle of the Nile! he'll be getting us into a grand fleet engagement afore the Yankee nation has rammed home her cartridges let alone blowing the match!" "Who talks of luffing?" roared a roystering fore-top-man.
There was on board of the Neversink a fore-top-man by the name of Landless, who, though his back was cross-barred, and plaided with the ineffaceable scars of all the floggings accumulated by a reckless tar during a ten years' service in the Navy, yet he perpetually wore a hilarious face, and at joke and repartee was a very Joe Miller. That man, though a sea-vagabond, was not created in vain.
They belonged to that small class of aged seamen who, for their previous long and faithful services, are retained in the Navy more as pensioners upon its merited bounty than anything else. They are set to light and easy duties. "Ar'n't this the fore-top-man, Shenly?" asked the foremost, looking full at the frozen face before him.
An old gunner's mate of the mess Priming, the man with the hare-lip, who, true to his tribe, was charged to the muzzle with bile, and, moreover, rammed home on top of it a wad of sailor superstition this gunner's mate indulged in some gloomy and savage remarks strangely tinged with genuine feeling and grief at the announcement of the sick-ness of Shenly, coming as it did not long after the almost fatal accident befalling poor Baldy, captain of the mizzen-top, another mess-mate of ours, and the dreadful fate of the amputated fore-top-man whom we buried in Rio, also our mess-mate.
Robert Yarn, the fore-top-man who had felt the locks of the sea-green lady blowing in his face during the squall, took advantage of the circumstance to dilate on his experiences; and, after having advanced certain positions that particularly favored his own theories, he produced one of the crew of the barge, who stood ready to affirm, in any court in Christendom, that he actually saw the process of changing the beautiful and graceful lines that distinguished the hull of the smuggler, into the coarser and more clumsy model of the coaster.
In the middle watch of the night, the fore-top-man slips out of his hammock, and by creeping along in the shadows, eludes the vigilance of the master-at-arms and his mates, gains a port-hole, and softly lowers himself into the water, almost without creating a ripple the sentries marching to and fro on their overhanging platform above him.
"And now I am going to honour him as never foreigner was honoured yet." He flung back the flag that shrouded the old fore-top-man, and spread it over both. "In death we are all friends," he said, arranging it with tender fingers. "Let us pray." And in the dusk the living knelt beside the dead. It was high noon. The Victory's barge lay on Southsea Beach.
In the earlier part of the cruise, while making a long, tedious run from Mazatlan to Callao on the Main, baffled by light head winds and frequent intermitting calms, when all hands were heartily wearied by the torrid, monotonous sea, a good-natured fore-top-man, by the name of Candy quite a character in his way standing in the waist among a crowd of seamen, touched me, and said, "D'ye see the old man there, White-Jacket, walking the poop?
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