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Updated: May 18, 2025
It was not until the spring of 1910 that we could afford to engage any officers or men for the ship, so that most of the work of rigging her was done by dock-side workers under a good old master rigger named Malley. Landsmen would have stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Malley's men with their diminutive dolly-winch had they watched our new masts and yards being got into place.
Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.
As they rise in rank, they naturally carry them up, whence the inveterate repugnance of many Commodores and Captains to the slightest innovations in the service, however salutary they may appear to landsmen.
Beside the chain-gang, each of Spinola's ships was manned by two hundred soldiers, while thirty-six musketeers from the Flushing garrison were the only men-at-arms in De Moor's whole squadron. But those amphibious Zeelanders and Hollanders, perfectly at home in the water, expert in handling vessels, and excellent cannoneers, were more than a match for twenty times their number of landsmen.
They had come intending to enslave others, and they were going away in fear that they would be themselves enslaved. Instead of the prayers and hymns with which they had put to sea, they were now departing amid appeals to heaven of another sort. They were no longer sailors but landsmen, depending, not upon their fleet but upon their infantry.
To unaccustomed ears, the sounds on this occasion lead one to suppose the ship is going to pieces; while the cries for help from the broken-shinned, sea-sick landsmen, the bawling for cleats and lashings from the mate of the decks, the thumping of hammers, and the loud laugh of the light-hearted middies, enchanted with the uproar, make a fine concert.
Nautical men may suppose that this was a serious storm only to landsmen; but the "Orestes," which was once in sight, and at another time forty miles off during the same gale, split eighteen sails; and the "Pioneer" had to be lightened of parts of a sugar- mill she was carrying; her round-house was washed away, and the cabin was frequently knee-deep in water.
It reminds me of dear old Minister and days gone by, when he used to call us round him, and repeated to us the promise 'that when two or three were gathered together in God's name, he would grant their request. The only difference is, sailors are more attentive and devout than landsmen. They seem more conscious that they are in the Divine presence.
Read this simple record and tell me if there is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen solicitors, if I remember right go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a long-shore youth, and they embark in a tiny boat in which they put to sea. Where do they turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they penetrate to Paraquay, return to the West Indies, sell their little boat there, and so home.
I thanked him and sought the deck. An hour after we passed Sandy Hook, my new acquaintance succumbed to the evils that afflict landsmen who go down to the sea in ships. Without any qualm of stomach or conscience, I returned the advice he had proffered me. I present it here as he wrote it.
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