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Updated: June 24, 2025
"Keep her away a point, quarter-master, and give that island ahead a wide berth," said the skipper. "Ay, ay, sir," answered Gimbals; and I thought his voice sounded strange and melancholy in the deepening gloom.
Now everyone knows that a frog has eyes mounted in that part of his head which is FRONT WHEN HE IS DOWN AND BACK WHEN HE STANDS UP. They are set like a compass on gimbals. Long and steadily they gazed, until, at last, their toes being tired, they fell down on all fours. I don't believe there is any 'great ocean'!"
In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind.
But that way was never used. The mysterious arrival had discovered the advantage of this particular shape. Entering my room, lighted strongly by a big bulkhead lamp swung on gimbals above my writing desk, I did not see him anywhere till he stepped out quietly from behind the coats hung in the recessed part. "I heard somebody moving about, and went in there at once," he whispered.
Kidd was quite delighted with the compass, the card of which was properly marked and framed in a block of wood, and said it could easily be suspended on gimbals and fixed on a binnacle.
And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy emptiness of the ship's cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in gimbals from a deck-beam.
The lamp wriggled in the gimbals, the loosened books toppled from side to side on the shelf, the long barometer swung in jerky circles, the table altered its slant every moment. In the midst of all this stir and movement Captain MacWhirr, holding on, showed his eyes above the upper edge, and asked, "What's the matter?" "Swell getting worse, sir." "Noticed that in here," muttered Captain MacWhirr.
The Wavecrest pitched a good bit at the end of her cable. I made up my bed and arranged the lamp in its gimbals near the head of the berth, and so took off my outer clothing and lay down to read. I did not think that the lamplight could be seen from without, even if a boat came quite near me. Being so far in-shore I had lit no riding light. It was unnecessary at these moorings.
The boats sent away on this occasion were the first cutter, under Mr Woods, the second lieutenant, the second cutter, under Gimbals, the quarter-master, with little Smellie to lend a hand, and the jollyboat, under the command of no less a personage than Mr Robert Summers.
"It was the captain's delight, while ashore, to have every timepiece, stationary or portable, taken apart in the presence of his daughter and himself, while he told his sailor yarns, and Lois stood ready to serve his punch, or pass to the fat, smooth-faced, cheerful Minuit the pieces of mechanism: brass gimbals, chronometer-boxes, wheels and springs, ship-glasses, compasses, the manifold parts of little things by which men grope their way out of sight of land, hung between a human watch and the crystal shell of the embossed heaven.
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