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Updated: June 17, 2025
"Who did?" said the captain, sternly. "Beg pardon, sir, didn't see, sir, but it made the two niggers wild, and one got a knife and the other a marlin-spike; and if they hadn't been held there'd ha' been murder done, and "
My rule most generally was to find one soft spot on 'em somewhere that a marlin-spike would hurt, and then hit that spot hard and often. That's the only way I ever got somewhere with a cargo and got back ag'in the same year." "I suppose it has to be," sighed his wife, making a note. "It's like killing little calves for veal, and all such things that make the fond heart ache."
If any man did not do exactly what he wanted, the captain would tear off his cap, seize his hair, and then, kicking his legs, bring him down on the deck. One day he knocked a poor fellow down with a hand-spike, and thrashed him with a boat-stretcher; and soon afterwards threw a marlin-spike at the head of another, and wounded him severely in the ear.
I pulled out Davies's knife and worked the point of the blade between sash and frame to give it play no result; but the knife was a nautical one, with a marlin-spike as well as a big blade. Just now the door within opened and shut again, and I heard steps approaching round the corner to my right. Someone whom I could not see walked past till his boots clattered on tiles, next resounded on boards.
And Charles Davis signalized the event by murdering O'Sullivan. It was Boney, the lanky splinter of a youth in Mr. Mellaire's watch, who brought the news. The second mate and I had just arrived in the hospital room, when Mr. Pike entered. O'Sullivan's troubles were over. The man in the upper bunk had completed the mad, sad span of his life with the marlin-spike.
Ben threw down the ash branch and plunged one hand into a pocket in search of his tobacco box. With great deliberation he rolled up a quantity of the weed and deposited it under one cheek, before he attempted to answer either the pleading looks or passionate language of the youth. "Mister Ralph, it's plain as a marlin-spike, you ain't used to snakes and wimmen.
A fresh-coloured native, with a prodigious breadth of face, only to be surpassed by his prodigious breadth of shoulders, approached, and addressed us in a brogue so strong, that it would, like the boatswain's grog, have floated a marlin-spike, and in a stuttering so thick, that a horn spoon would have stood upright in it.
But to see Tom as he was, was to catch him at work, with knife and marlin-spike, secured by rope-yarns round his neck, his hands showing intimate acquaintance with the tar bucket, while not a job was there to be done which he could not show the best way of doing. Tom Calder, as was said of him, was the man to get work out of a crew, and where he led others were ever ready to follow.
There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower bunk, rolling his eyes and raving. In the top bunk, directly above, lay Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe. I looked for the marlin-spike. There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him. "It's hell, ain't it, sir?" was his greeting. "And how am I goin' to get any sleep with that baboon chattering away there.
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