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Updated: June 21, 2025
The moon was in its third quarter, and did not rise until eleven o'clock. The first part of the night was dark, and there was only a faint starlight into which the anxious eyes of the look-out men peered from the forecastles of the three ships. At ten o'clock Columbus was walking on the poop of his vessel, when he suddenly saw a light right ahead.
In those days the art of navigation was in its infancy, and the art of tacking against the wind had scarcely begun to be understood; indeed, so high were the ships out of water, with their lofty poops and forecastles, that it was scarce possible to sail them on a wind, so great was the leeway they made.
A mast was sprung and had to be cut away; another, and the woodwork from the forecastles and high stern works had to be stripped and lashed round the crazy mainmast to preserve it from wholesale destruction.
Therefore, when the British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well not only the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford.
"All asleep in the steerage, sir," he said. Then a quartermaster entered with the same report of the forecastles. "Very well," said the captain, rising; "one by one come into my office watchmen first, then petty officers, then the men. Quartermasters will watch the door that no man goes out until I have seen him."
He was, however, badly out of his reckoning, as on board of her was a veteran company of Spanish infantry, stark fighters to a man, who feared no odds, and who were skilfully commanded by Captain Robeira, grown grey in the Moorish wars. With bloodcurdling yells the galleys swept alongside with the fighting men massed on the high poops and forecastles of their vessels.
His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had been addressed in those various situations.
Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with shoals and ledges.
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy. At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.
Meanwhile, the five men, having summoned three others from the forecastle to their assistance, got to work with the exasperating deliberation characteristic of the British merchant seaman to be found in the forecastles of small craft; and first of all they got the jolly- boat down on deck and ran her aft, out of the way; then they cleared out a number of warps, cork fenders, and other lumber from the long-boat, lifted her out of her chocks, and finally, unshipping the gangway, launched her overboard, fisherman-fashion, and dropped her astern, riding to her painter.
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