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Updated: May 12, 2025
With his face working convulsively, Captain Belchior glanced at his captors, at his eager, waiting crew, at the wheel without a helmsman, at a darkening of the water on the starboard bow to the southward, up aloft, and back again at the three frowning muzzles so close to his head. "One hand to the wheel! Square in main and cro'-jack yards!" he called. He was conquered.
"I've been shipmates," he declared between oaths, "with freak names of all nations; but this gang beats me. Say, you," he called, "you with the cro'-jack eye there, what's that name you go by? Who are you?"
But the steward tells me that he was educated for the priesthood, and fell by the wayside. That one close to the hatch the one with the red head and hang-dog jib is Seldom Helward. He was shot off the cro'-jack yard; he fell into the lee clew of the cro'-jack, so we pulled him in." "What did he do, captain?" asked the grizzled skipper. "Threw a marlinespike at the mate." "What made him throw it?"
The ship, I may as well say, was one of the packets that traded between New York and Liverpool, sometimes carrying passengers, but not always. We had none this trip. "Before we were two days out from Sandy Hook I got a taste of the skipper's caliber. A man aloft a big, red-headed fellow, gave me an insolent answer from the cro'-jack yard, and I called him down.
"I signaled for slack and walked around her, taking note of her rig. She had three masts, and three tops very much like the fighting tops of our modern battleships. There were no royal masts, but she had two sprit-sail yards under the bowsprit and jib boom, and a huge lateen yard on the mizzen that took the place of the cro'-jack.
Hard up the wheel! Check in port main and starboard cro'-jack braces! Shiver the topsail! Slack off that spanker!" Before he had finished the men had reached their posts. The orders were obeyed.
Three days' beard is almost as depressing as three days' starvation, and the little shop at the corner, which renewed my self-respect for a penny, seemed to me a most admirable institution. As for drinks, we had none we were sober sailors indeed. The sun might get over the fore-yard and go down over the cro'-jack but we never touched liquor.
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