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Updated: June 25, 2025
The topsail halliards had of course been let go before this, and the loose sails were filled out like balloons, so that it took some time to get in the bunt and tie the reef points; but it was at last done, and we returned to the deck I being especially triumphant at having out-paced one of the smartest topmen in the ship, in gaining the weather earing of the foretop sail before him, and completing my task so quickly as to get down on deck before some of the rest had yet left the yard.
No such scruples interfered with the use of the other animal, which was kept chiefly, I believe, for servile purposes. He was small and mean-looking his foretop and mane in a hopeless tangle, with hay-seed on his eyelids, and damp straws scattered promiscuously around his body.
My two other friends Tom Twig and Dicky Esse were glad to go to sea again with Captain Schank. I also fell in with Toby Kiddle and Pat Brady at Portsmouth. I persuaded both to join, Toby being rated as a quarter-master, and Pat as captain of the foretop.
For an hour or more the buccaneers had been hauling over little by little toward the coast, possibly with the idea of running in and escaping overland as soon as night should fall. Now the lookout in the foretop of the Tigers gave a cheer. "They've caught a flaw in the wind!" he shouted. "Watch us come up!"
"The devil!" ejaculated Lieutenant Dabchick, in his flurry using a stronger expression than he would probably have done had `old Hankey Pankey' been on the quarter-deck, rushing into the chart-house on the bridge and snatching up a telescope, which he brought to bear on the horizon in the direction indicated by Adams in the foretop above, whose point of vantage, of course, gave him a wider range of view.
As soon as the merits of the different men were ascertained, several alterations were made in the watch and station bills, as well as in the ratings on the ship's books, and Tom and I were made second captains, larboard and starboard, of the foretop.
One day in our passage we met with an accident which was near burning the ship. A black cook, in melting some fat, overset the pan into the fire under the deck, which immediately began to blaze, and the flame went up very high under the foretop. With the fright the poor cook became almost white, and altogether speechless. Happily however we got the fire out without doing much mischief.
"It's twelve o'clock, sir," said the master, touching his hat, with his quadrant in his hand. "Make it so, and pipe to dinner." Newton was stationed in the foretop. In a few days the awkwardness arising from the novelty of the scene and from the superior dimensions of every variety of equipment on board of the frigate, compared to the small craft to which he had been accustomed, passed away.
We had men in our foretop looking for the guard-ship, and because they knew almost exactly where to look for her, we saw her in time and swung the Bess inside her, yet closer to the breakers. Her big bulk piled toward us, her great sails reached up in clouds shadows of clouds. Past our bow, past our waist, past our quarter.
Upon this occasion, however, he kept clear of the corps, and attacked one of his oldest and dearest friends, no less a personage than the captain of the foretop. It was in warm weather, and the men, as usual, were dining on the main-deck; the grog had been served out, and the happy Johnnies were just beginning to sip their darling beverage, when Mr.
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