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Updated: May 16, 2025
Now, it happened that Mr W , who had an eye like a hawk, when he cast his eyes aloft, observed that the bunt of the maintopsail was not exactly so well stowed as it ought to be on board of a man-of-war; which is not to be wondered at, when it is recollected that the midshipmen had been very busy enlarging it to make a pantry.
"Pass the word quietly," said Seymour, rapidly, to one of his young aids, "that when I say, 'Stand by to back the maintopsail, the guns are to be fired. Bid the gun captains to train on the port-holes of the second tier of guns. Mind, no order to fire will be given except the words, 'Stand by to back the maintopsail. The men are to fire at the word 'topsail. Do you understand?
He has not surrendered. I know their game. Give him your broadside, sir, or he is off to windward of you, like a shot. No, no, we have him now; heave to Mr. Splinter, heave to!" We did so, and that so suddenly, that the studding sail booms snapped like pipe shanks short off by the irons. Notwithstanding, we had shot two hundred yards to the leeward, before we could lay our maintopsail to the mast.
The storm did not last long, but for about four hours it blew furiously. It was not yet at its height, and the ship was still carrying her close reefed maintopsail with reefed main trysail and fore topmast staysail, when a sharper lurch than usual threw a sudden strain upon the bumpkin to which the weather main brace was led, and in a moment it had snapped in two.
"Send you back, my boys! No, no, too happy to get you." Another gun from the corvette. "Firebrands, you must shove off. My compliments, Wiggins, to the Captain, and there's a trifle for you to drink my health, when you get into port." The boat shoved off the corvette filled her maintopsail. "Put the helm down ease off the mainsheet stand by to run up the squaresail.
The hurricane had caught them aback and dismasted them during the night, and after six hours of plunging helplessly into the sea without anything but the mainmast and stump of the foremast above the deck, she had sprung a leak and filled rapidly. The maintopsail they had bent in the morning after extraordinary exertion, and with this they had managed to keep her partly under control.
She pitched with the majesty of a line-of-battle ship, as she launched herself in long floating rushes from gleaming pinnacle to seething valley with a heavy, melancholy sobbing of water all about her decks, and her narrow, distended band of maintopsail hovering overhead black as a raven's pinion in the flying hoariness.
I was fourteen years old, homeward bound on my first voyage; a little bit of a midshipman, burnt dry by Pacific suns, with a mortal hatred and terror of the wild, inexpressibly bitter cold of the roaring ice-loaded parallels in whose Antarctic twilight our noble ship was plunging and rolling now under a fragment of maintopsail, now under a reefed foresail and double-reefed foretopsail, chased by the shrieking western gale that flew like volleys of scissors and thumbscrews over our taffrail, and by seas, whose glittering, flickering peaks one looked up at from the neighbourhood of the wheel as at the brows of tall and beetling cliffs.
By the time the Industry had got out into Boston Bay she had set her mainsail and her foresail, and her maintopsail and her foretopsail, and her maintopgallantsail and her foretopgallantsail, and her mainroyal and her foreroyal, and her mainskysail and her foreskysail, and all of her jibs and her spanker and her staysails; and the sailors were busy getting out her studdingsail booms.
She was a little short thick woman; but, stout as she was when I had the honour of an embrace, she must have been once much stouter, for her skin appeared from the colour and texture to have come to her at second hand, and to have originally belonged to a much larger person, for it bagged and hung in flaps about her jowls and bosom, like an ill cut maintopsail, which sits clumsily about the clews.
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