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Updated: June 25, 2025
He accordingly came forward, turned all hands to, with tackles on the stays and back-stays, coming up with the seizings, hauling here, belaying there, and full of business, standing between the knightheads to sight the mast, when the captain came forward, and also began to give orders.
"Boarders prepare to repel boarders!" exclaimed O'Flaherty, drawing his sword. I whipped out my toasting iron, and at the same moment down came Courtenay on deck by way of the back-stays. "Give me a musket, somebody," exclaimed he, as he alighted on the rail and sprang nimbly from thence to the deck.
Mate knocks off work and clears up decks earlier than usual, and orders a man who has been employed aloft to send the royal halyards over to windward, as he comes down. Breast back-stays hauled taut, and a tackle got upon the martingale back-rope. One of the boys furls the mizzen royal. Cook thinks there is going to be ``nasty work, and has supper ready early.
The topmast and the topgallant-mast had come down after the back-stays parted, and fresh fractures could plainly be seen as high as the cap of the masthead. Fragments of all kinds, yards, spars, a part of the sails, breakers, cases, hen-coops, were probably floating at the foot of the mass and drifting with it.
Howbeit I had soon unravelled some fifty yards of good stout twine, and abundance of more yet to hand together with the heavier ropes such as shrouds and back-stays. Taking this line I came to that rocky cleft where I had killed the goat, and clambering up the bush-grown cliff found it to be honey-combed with caves large and small and with abundant evidences of the animals I sought.
To-day was our last day at Copenhagen, and the crew seemed determined to make it the gayest. At early dawn, floating from the mast head to the bowsprit end, then down again to the boom-end, even to the water; and from the cross-trees along both back-stays, every flag and pennant on board the yacht might have been seen.
Let go the halliards; down staysails and jib." The sailors, now conscious of the coming danger, worked desperately. The light upper sails were secured, the courses had been clewed up, but the topsails were still but half-lashed when Wilkinson shouted again: "Down for your lives! Down on the weather side; slip down by the back-stays.
He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it takes a salt smack of romance in his lips.
"Yes, Madam Budd, yes; we was steering for a Mediterranean port, intending to clear a mole-head, when a sea took us under the larboard-quarter, gave us such a sheer to-port as sent our cat-head ag'in a spile, and raked away the chain-plates of the top-mast back-stays, bringing down all the forrard hamper about our ears."
Not satisfied with brailing up, they furled the sails, lashed the earrings, secured the clew-lines, bunt-lines, and leech-lines, and clapped preventer-shrouds on the block straps, which thus might serve as back-stays. They fished the mast. They battened down the ports and bulls'-eyes, which is a method of walling up a ship.
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