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Updated: June 25, 2025
"Take that rope," commanded the captain to a sailor, "and lay it on; that will teach him to obey orders." The sailor took the rope, and beat the boy most cruelly. "Now, drink that grog," said the captain. "Please, sir, I would rather not." "Then go into the foretop and stay all night."
It was noticed that he begged permission to "monkey" with the electric-light signalling apparatus aft on the poop. When we began the sail drill the following day, the attention of every man on the ship was focused on the captain of the foretop, and at the order "Away aloft!" he sprang at the rigging like a cat. We stood from under.
"There's myself, Paul Pringle, quartermaster, at your honour's service; and there's Peter Ogle, captain of the foretop, and Abel Bush, he's captain of the fo'castle; and then, d'ye see, we've each of us our mates to take command if any of us loses the number of our mess; and then as there's the two godmothers Nancy and Betty, right honest good women, the little chap won't fare badly, d'ye see, your honour."
The quarter-deck was "lumbered up" with hogsheads of water, and casks of oats and barley, and hen-coops without number. With such a deck-load, not an unusually large one in those days, the leading trucks attached to the fore-rigging were about half way between the main deck and the foretop.
The foretop men, however, this time, bore away the palm over those attending to the main-topsail; while those on the cro'jack-yard were completely out of the running with only four hands against the fourteen in the other top although Tom Jerrold was pretty quick again, and if those helping him had been but equally sharp they might, in spite of being short-handed, have achieved the victory.
Matt was still a growing boy, with a growing boy's appetite; consequently on the morning of his second day of fasting he came to the conclusion that, with so much of his life before him, a few months wasted would, after all, have no material bearing on his future; so he accepted a two months advance from a crimp and shipped aboard the American barkentine Retriever as a common A.B. a most disgraceful action on the part of a boy, who, since eighteenth birthday, had been used to having old sailors touch their foretop to him and address him as "Mr.
On lifting their eyes aloft they beheld a singular-looking object gazing at them over the edge of the foretop. It appeared to be some huge animal, though of what kind they could not make out. Scarcely waiting to consider what they were doing, Bob and Jack prepared to fire. A wild shriek echoed along the deck.
A wild cry from the foretop. A mass, grey, indistinct, horrible, rising from the wild waters, scarce a hundred yards from her bowsprit. A mad hurrying to and fro. A crash. A great ruin of masts and spars, and then utter, hopeless destruction. That is the way the poor old Madagascar must have gone. The Lord send us safe through the ice.
The second lieutenant was the officer of the deck, and was pacing the planks on the starboard side, while the lookouts in the foretop and on the top-gallant forecastle were attending closely to their duty, doubtless with a vision of more prize money floating through their brains.
There was a nineteen-year-old lad who, when I knew him two years before, was doing boy's work in the Collier bookbindery. Now he was a gun-captain standing handy to his little pet and trying not to look too proud when he peeked up toward where I was. The foretop reported smoke on the horizon ahead. That would be on the Luckenbach. And where she was the U-boat was.
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