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Updated: June 12, 2025
Then they saw more English vessels patrolling the coast line like aggressive and vigilant dogs. Two North American battleships could be distinguished by their mast-heads in the form of baskets. Then a Russian battleship, white and glistening, passed at full steam on its way to the Baltic. "Bad!" said the South American passengers regretfully. "Very bad!
We lashed blocks to our lower mast-heads, rove hawsers through them, sent the ends on shore, made them fast to the guns, and hove off three of them, one after another, by the capstan; and had the end of the hawser on shore, ready for the others, when our marine videttes were surprised by the French, driven in, and retreated to the beach, with the loss of one man taken prisoner.
The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears.
And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her say, an empty vial even then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last! and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft, "Man the mast-heads!" and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard "What d'ye see? sharp! sharp!"
The wind increased every instant, low heavily laden clouds bounded the horizon, circumscribed to a couple of miles. Sometimes the ship sank so low in the trough of the sea that the curling summits of the waves appeared to reach above her mast-heads; now she climbed a watery height, to remain but for a moment, before she rushed down again on her impetuous course.
As for la Pauline, herself, I could just discover her lower mast-heads, inclining at an angle of forty-five degrees from the perpendicular, through a vista in the trees. There was a good-humoured common sense in all the proceedings of Mons. Le Compte, that showed he was a philosopher in the best sense of the word.
The chains designates the small platform outside of the hull, at the base of the large shrouds leading down from the three mast-heads to the bulwarks. At present they seem to be getting out of vogue among merchant-vessels, along with the fine, old-fashioned quarter-galleries, little turret-like ap-purtenances, which, in the days of the old Admirals, set off the angles of an armed ship's stern.
They approached with the red flag at their mast-heads. This was the North Sea fleet, with the admiral and all the officers under arrest. "No sooner were we seen than a frigate bore down on us. That we could escape her was doubtful; and though we could have beaten her off had we fired, we should have brought the rest of the fleet down on us.
"Then off!" shouted the "Boston's" skipper, and at the word down came his topgallant sheets, the yards going up at the same moment, and the royal sheets fluttering down into their berths, as the yards rose to meet them; then up went the royal yards to their respective mast-heads, the courses dropped heavily down, the staysails and flying-jib slid up their stays, and the driver was hauled out, the whole being done with the regularity and rapidity of a well-oiled and easy-working machine.
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