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Updated: May 27, 2025
So saying, Moses struck two fingers on the capstan after the manner of a tuning-fork, and, holding them gravely to his ear as if to get the right pitch, began in a really fine manly voice to chant the following ditty: "Go to Work." Oh when de sun am shinin' bright, and eberyt'ing am fair, Clap on de steam an' go to work, an' take your proper share.
Now I want you to 'tend to your business. D'you understand me?" I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and started to say that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn condition of "stiffening up," and "belting other fellows over the head with a capstan bar," would insult a woman dying with consumption, but I suddenly became too full for utterance.
And after this fashion he put a stop to their murmurings. But there was one circumstance, to which heretofore I have but barely alluded, that tended more than anything else to reconcile many to their situation. This was the receiving regularly, twice every day, a certain portion of Pisco, which was served out at the capstan, by the steward, in little tin measures called "tots."
We were by this time pretty well sobered; at four a gun was fired, the topsails were let fall, and sheeted home, and topgallant sails set over them, the ship having previously been hove short; at half past, the cable being right up and down another gun the drums and fifes beat merrily, spin flew the capstan, tramp went the men that manned it.
Indeed, the topsails were already off the caps, the captain on deck, and the men gathered at the capstan. "Have you not enough to wish you good-by, Dolly?" I asked. "There must be a score of them," said my lady, making a face. "But I wish to talk to you." Mr. Marmaduke, however, had no notion of allowing a gathering in his daughter's honour to be broken up.
I was very much astonished; I hardly knew whether I had done right or wrong; at all events, thought I to myself, I did for the best; so I put it on the capstan, and walked to my own side of the deck. The captain and first lieutenant then went below, and O'Brien came aft. I told him what had occurred, and how the master was angry with me.
With the same good fighting man he served at the Nile, where the men of his command sponged and rammed and trained until, when the last tricolour had come down, they hove up the sheet anchor and fell dead asleep upon the top of each other under the capstan bars.
"We may then get that ironwork of ours to rights." The capstan was manned. Scarcely had the men commenced tramping round than a loud report was heard. The messenger had given way, when the cable ran out to the clench, carrying away the stoppers, and running through both compressors. By great exertions, however, the messenger was again shackled together and the anchor hove up.
"Here's a state of things!" he used to say in summer-time; "thistles full of seed within a biscuit-heave of my front door, and other things I forget their names with heads like the head of a capstan bursting, all as full of seeds as a purser is of lies!" "Your lordship do not understand them subjects," Mr.
After I had ceased ringing, and slowly tolled the bell for a few minutes, so that I might make it seem as if I were going to meeting in Roxbury, I sat down on the capstan to think matters over. Nothing had happened yet that excited me like this.
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