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Updated: May 22, 2025
Superadded to these, were four capacious pockets on the outside; one pair to slip books into when suddenly startled from my studies to the main-royal-yard; and the other pair, for permanent mittens, to thrust my hands into of a cold night-watch. This last contrivance was regarded as needless by one of my top-mates, who showed me a pattern for sea-mittens, which he said was much better than mine.
Ere my watch in the top had expired, high up on the main-royal-yard I reclined, the white jacket folded around me like Sir John Moore in his frosted cloak.
A top-man next me on the main-royal-yard removed his hat, and diligently manipulated his head in honour of the event; but he was so far out of sight in the clouds, that this ceremony went for nothing.
And I feel persuaded in my inmost soul, that it is to the fact of my having been a main-top-man; and especially my particular post being on the loftiest yard of the frigate, the main-royal-yard; that I am now enabled to give such a free, broad, off-hand, bird's-eye, and, more than all, impartial account of our man-of-war world; withholding nothing; inventing nothing; nor flattering, nor scandalising any; but meting out to all commodore and messenger-boy alike their precise descriptions and deserts.
At the sound I sprang into the rigging, and was soon at my perch. How I hung over that main-royal-yard in a rapture High in air, poised over that magnificent bay, a new world to my ravished eyes, I felt like the foremost of a flight of angels, new-lighted upon earth, from some star in the Milky Way.
At daybreak I sent a man right up to the main-royal-yard, where he remained until the light was thoroughly strong, and then came down with the report that the horizon was clear.
Not many days after Baldy's accident in furling sails in this same frenzied manner, under the stimulus of a shouting officer a seaman fell from the main-royal-yard of an English line-of-battle ship near us, and buried his ankle-bones in the deck, leaving two indentations there, as if scooped out by a carpenter's gouge.
By three o'clock p.m. we had neared the two vessels sufficiently to bring their hulls into view from the main-royal-yard; they were then lying broadside-on to us with their heads to the eastward, the ship being between us and the brig; but by the aid of our glasses we were able to make out that they had apparently dropped alongside each other, and the skipper gave it as his decided opinion that foul play was going on on the part of one or the other of the two craft.
Well-timed was the latter thought, for the life to come was much nearer overtaking me than I then could imagine. Perhaps I was half conscious at last of a tremulous voice hailing the main-royal-yard from the top. But if so, the consciousness glided away from me, and left me in Lethe.
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