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Updated: May 20, 2025
The next thing is to haul taut for a swing. The weather cross-jack braces and the lee main braces are belayed together upon two pins, and ready to be let go, and the opposite braces hauled taut. ``Main topsail haul! shouts the captain; the braces are let go; and if he has chosen his time well, the yards swing round like a top; but if he is too late, or too soon, it is like drawing teeth.
She had surrendered; he had reached her level, only to die; and he thought this strange. Facing downward, head inboard now, and nearly horizontal, he was passing the cross-jack yard. Below him was the sea black and crisp, motionless as though carved in ebony.
However, in time, the sails were adjusted by the five sailors, aided by the stimulus of the captain's oaths. The MACQUARIE stood out to sea on the larboard tack, under all her lower sails, topsails, topgallants, cross-jack, and jib. By and by, the other sails were hoisted. But in spite of this additional canvas the brig made very little way.
"Aa hal i aa iaa Cheerily, men!" were delivered in a scornful shout. "You'll have a chance of cooling yourselves presently, my lads," said Salvé, coming up at the moment from his own heavy work with the cross-jack; "when we weather the point, all the lee-sails have to be set" and the remark had the effect which he desired of intensifying the prevailing irritation.
"Brace round your head yards!" he now sung out; and the foretack was boarded while the main-sheet was hauled aft, we on the poop swinging the cross-jack yard at the same time, the captain then calling out to the helmsman sharply, "Luff, you beggar, luff, can't ye!"
She was rigged with three masts in addition to the short spar which reared itself from the outer extremity of her bowsprit, and upon which the sprit topsail was set, the fore and main masts spreading courses, topsails, and what was then quite an innovation topgallant sails, while the mizen spread a lateen-shaped sail stretched along a sloping yard suspended just beneath the top, in the position occupied in these days by the cross-jack.
"Cross-jack yards all well!" "Well all aft!" "Haul taught to windward!" Everything being now trimmed and in order, each man coils up the rigging at his own station, and the order is given "Go below the watch!"
"Ah! I thought so," said the god of the sea. "His royal highness should take a leaf out of my book: never allow it to be doubtful who is commanding officer." "And pray what might your majesty's specific be, to cure a bad wife?" said the captain. "Three feet of the cross-jack brace every morning before breakfast, for a quarter of an hour, and half an hour on a Sunday."
During one of the lulls in the series of squalls that swept over the vessel in rapid sequence, Mr McCarthy came below by the direction of the captain who, of course, could not leave the deck to see how the passengers were getting on, as well as to have the dead-lights put up in the state-rooms, in case of the stern-ports being battered in by the waves; for these had now swollen to an enormous size, and seemed veritably mountains high, rising up far above the cross-jack yard sometimes.
I was stationed at the weather cross-jack braces; three other light hands at the lee; one boy at the spanker-sheet and guy; a man and a boy at the main topsail, top-gallant, and royal braces; and all the rest of the crew men and boys tallied on to the main brace.
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