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Updated: June 7, 2025
He veritably sees things, and he makes the reader see them. And all the strange and curious sea jargon, of which not one landsman in a thousand understands anything combings and back-stays and dead-eyes, and the rest of it takes a salt smack of romance in his lips.
"An' that's most as fer as I got when along comes that all-fired 'dead-eyes' an' points warnin' at me while he ogled me with them gummy red rims o' his. An', sez he, 'You light right out o' here sharp, Arizona; the place fer you scum's down in the bunkhouse. An' I'm not goin' to have any skulkin' up here, telling disreputable yarns to my gal. I wus jest beginnin' to argyfy.
The upper ends of these chain-plates are furnished with what are called dead-eyes, great round blocks of wood pierced with holes, through which the lanyards are rove by which the rigging is set up, or drawn almost as tight as bars of iron. The topmasts, rising immediately above the lower masts, are supported chiefly by rigging spread out by the tops, or what people on shore miscall round-tops.
"And the time may come when you will know what a round-turn is, too, if you let go your hold of honesty. A man's neck was made, brother, to keep his head above water, and not to be stretched out of shape like a pair of badly fitted dead-eyes. Therefore have your reckoning worked up in season, and the lead of conscience going, when you find yourself drifting on the shoals of temptation."
Placing our heads close to the dead-eyes of the rigging, so as to expose ourselves as little as possible, we waited patiently for another flash of lightning Smellie looking aft and I looking forward, by hastily- whispered agreement. Presently the flash came. "Did you catch sight of the look-out?" whispered Smellie to me. "No, sir," I whispered back; "did you?"
It is no exaggeration to say that there was scarcely a dry eye in the two vessels; for, while the settlers wept for sorrow, the crews and passengers wept more or less from sympathy. Even the dead-eyes of the ship, according to Malone, shed tears!
Within the bulwarks, on each side, stand rows of black blocks, to which the shrouds were once attached; these blocks are called by sailors "dead-eyes," and each stands in weird mockery, with its three ominous holes, like so many human skulls before some palace in Dahomey.
"And there's where you get a good idea," said the "pirate." "But there's no good having a peep' at him without his disguise now that it's Harry," objected Hicks. "No," said the "pirate," turning on Owen his lusterless sea-green eyes, faded by much grog to a dimness that reminded one of the faint lights set in ships' decks and known as "dead-eyes."
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