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Updated: June 11, 2025
From a photograph by W. H. Franklin. Like their descendants now, who are seen daily in crowds lounging round the capstans, the night was most frequently their time of effort.
On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip not considerable of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach.
Engines revolve the turrets, raise the ashes from the engine-rooms, turn the capstans, work the rudders; engines do everything. Three monitors similar to those just described were built for the defence of several of our colonies. The colony of Victoria, we believe, purchased their ironclad, the Cerberus, from the home Government; at any rate, the people maintain her at their own cost.
The boats and rafts were then taken back to the ships, the men climbed on board, the windlasses and capstans were again manned, and, the vessels being considerably lightened, and so once more well afloat, were again hauled in until their keels touched bottom. The captain considered that they were now far enough up the beach, as the receding tide would leave them high and dry.
They had the hatches open, tackles aloft, and men at work below whilst the mariners of other countries would have been standing looking on and "jawing" upon the course to be taken. Some overran the fabric aloft, clearing, cutting away, pounding, making the ice fly in storms; others sweated the capstans till they clanked; others fell to the pumps, working with hammers and kettles of boiling water.
The brother and sister, seeing no one come to the appointment at the Trois Mathildes, will go down to the beach. Don't you think that we shall learn something then of the accomplice whom I accuse them of having and of the connection between the two cases?" They reached the esplanade in front of the Hauville chalets, with the capstans by which the fishermen haul up their boats to the beach.
On the other side of the harbor lay the marshes, threaded by steaming creeks, up which here and there the pointed sails of the hidden hay-barges crept, the sunshine turning them to white flames: farther off stood a screen of woods, and from brim to brim between swelled the broad, smooth sheet of the river, coming from the great mountains that gave it birth, washing clean a score of towns on its way, and loitering just here by the pleasant old fishing-town, whose wharves, once doing a mighty business with the Antilles and the farther Indies, now, in the absence of their half dozen foreign-going craft, lay at the mercy of any sand-droger that chose to fling her cable round their capstans.
Having delivered this preface, he divided the men into two gangs; one, under the boatswain, to attend to the rigging, clear the canvas of the ice, get the pumps and the capstans to work, and see all ready for getting sail on the schooner; the other, under the second mate, to get tackles aloft and break out the cargo, taking care to trim ship whilst so doing.
On the boat the ropes rattled through the pulleys and the iron chains of the capstans, while the master directed the movements of his crew by sharp blasts on his whistle I continued to sleep; in fine, by an ordinary effect of the profoundest sleep, I awakened only when silence succeeded to this uproar."
Besides these horse capstans there are steam capstans which are less complicated and have condensing steam engines of about 100 horse power, the power being transmitted by gearing to the rope drum.
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