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When he again took up the thread of his fancy the ship seemed to be lying on her beam ends on the sand; the strange arrangement of her upper deck and top-hamper, more like a dwelling than any ship he had ever seen, was fully exposed to view, while the seamen seemed to be at work with the rudest contrivances, calking and scraping her barnacled sides.
The safety of five hundred people, he said, depended on our discretion; the ship might not ignite for days, if at all, he thought, so carefully had the air been excluded from the cotton by the process of tight calking, so as to seal it almost hermetically; indeed, the fire might be wholly extinguished by the pumps, which were constantly at work, pouring streams of water around and through the hold; and a panic would be equal to a fire in any case.
Every low tide was a signal for great activity among the vessels made fast alongside the wharfs, for the rise of the water was nearly twenty feet, and when it receded the ships stood upright on their keels and exposed their bottoms to scraper, calking mallet, and paint-brush. In every house where father or son was expecting soon to sail the women were busy with clothing and general outfit.
It is also used extensively for calking vessels, making waterproof roofs, lining cold storage plants, making varnishes as well as shoe blacking as well as in a hundred other ways. At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which is the famous pitch lake. This is the most noted deposit of asphalt known.
There are many cocoa-palms bearing fruit of pleasant taste from which is made wine and common oil, which is a very healing remedy for wounds; and other wild palms of the forests that do not yield cocoa-nuts, but serve as wood, and from whose bark is made bonote, a tow for rigging and cables, and also for calking ships.
Next door, perhaps, stands a log house, flush with the sidewalk, its moss calking plainly visible between the huge ribs, its steeply sloping roof rising, almost within reach, above a single story; and its serpent-mouthed eave-spouts ingeniously arranged to pour a stream of water over the vulgar pedestrian.
One of the after berths, too, leaked in very bad weather; so that in a ship which was in other respects unusually tight, and brought her cargo to Boston perfectly dry, we had, after every effort made to prevent it, in the way of calking and leading, a forecastle with only three dry berths for seven of us.
Soon you were scouring the hollows in the woods for arbutus or splashing bare-legged into the bogs for cowslips. You even ventured knee-deep into the sea which although still chill was no longer frigid. And then, before you knew it, you were hauling out your fishing tackle and looking over your flies; inspecting the old dory and calking her seams with a coat of fresh paint.
Jones' again after bidding them good-by; it would be so awkward. So I concluded to go on board ship for the present. When I reached the deck, I saw no one but a large man in a large dripping pea-jacket, who was calking down the main-hatches. "What do you want, Pillgarlic?" said he. "I've shipped to sail in this ship," I replied, assuming a little dignity, to chastise his familiarity.
Taking a wide sweep round the house, Bart soon approached that part of it, on the back side, in which he rightly conjectured the young people were sitting; and gliding up to the wall with steps as noiseless as those of a mousing fox, he discovered a crevice between the logs, from which the moss calking had fallen out so as to permit a small pencil of light to escape.
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