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Updated: May 19, 2025
As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand.
Seeing the mate on the quarter-deck, I approached, and in a very respectful manner thus addressed him: 'If you please, sir, I come to ask if you will let us have the keelson for a table? Whereupon the mate turned fiercely upon me, and, to my great astonishment, roared out at the very top of his voice, 'What! what's that you say?
It was arrested, only half uttered, however, by a communication from the boatswain, who sat on a midship thwart, his arms folded, and his eye on the brig and the boats. "There goes the Molly's masts, sir! Both have gone together; and as good sticks was they, before them bomb-shells passed through our rigging, as was ever stepped in a keelson."
As long as there was light they could at least see what danger was to be faced, but now the barque was plunging and tossing through an inky obscurity. With a wild scooping motion she was hurled up on the summit of a great wave, and thence she shot down into the black gulf beyond with such force that when checked by meeting the next billow her whole fabric jarred from truck to keelson.
What do we mean by this? It is that curious nomenclature which from truck to keelson clothes the ship with strange but fitting phrases, which has its proverbs, idioms, and forms of expression that are of the sea, salt, and never of the land, earthy. Wherever tidewater flows, goes also some portion of this speech. It is "understanded of the people" among all truly nautical races.
As he had promised to make me a sailor, and I wished to become one, I soon picked up a fair amount of nautical knowledge; and by the time the ship was ready for sea, I could not only knot and splice, but had acquainted myself with every portion of her from "truck to keelson."
'Well, says the doctor, 'let's bargain. We bargained, him and I, and here we are; stores, brandy, blockhouse, the firewood you was thoughtful enough to cut, and, in a manner of speaking, the whole blessed boat, from crosstrees to keelson. As for them, they've tramped; I don't know where's they are." He drew again quietly at his pipe.
Often a writer tells us more of himself in criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal æsthetic pronunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the keelson of his workaday philosophy: "All adventure, all love, every success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation.
Being right in the eyes of her, as it is termed, we could plainly hear the water slapping against the bends outside of her, as it was divided by the keelson, and borne away by the strong flood tide. It was a melancholy sound; I had never heard it before; and during a pause, as I listened to it, one of the men observed, "Queer sound, boy, ain't it?
When the sloop was in the fiercest squalls, with only the reefed forestaysail set, even that small sail shook her from keelson to truck when it shivered by the leech. Had I harbored the shadow of a doubt for her safety, it would have been that she might spring a leak in the garboard at the heel of the mast; but she never called me once to the pump.
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