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Updated: June 28, 2025
When within about half a mile, the lifeboatmen saw the mainmast of the vessel go over, and then down crash came the mizzenmast over the port side, carrying with them in the ruin spars and rigging in confusion, and all this wild mass still hung by the shrouds and other rigging round the quarter and stem of the doomed ship, and were ever and anon drawn against her by the sea, beating her planking with thunderous noise and tremendous force.
It will be brain as well as brawn against mere brawn. I have worked like a Trojan all day, and the idea is realized. Margaret helped me out with suggestions, and Tom Spink did the sailorizing. Over our head, from the jiggermast, the steel stays that carry the three jigger-trysails descend high above the break of the poop and across the main deck to the mizzenmast.
Besides overseeing the continuous adjustment, by trimming of sails and orders to the helmsman, of the Arangi to her way on the sea, and overseeing the boat's crew at its task of washing deck and polishing brasswork, he was engaged in steadily nipping from a stolen bottle of his captain's whiskey which he had stowed away in the hollow between the two sacks of yams lashed on deck aft the mizzenmast.
The day was blazin' hot, an' a lot of the things I'd eat was pretty peppery. `Now, thinks I, `if there had been just one can o' peaches sech as I seen shinin' in the stars last night! An' just then, as I was walkin' aft, all by myself, I seed lodged on the stump of the mizzenmast a box with one corner druv down among the splinters.
Two ordinary seamen got upon the jib-boom, and I bade them keep a good hold, for the ship sometimes danced her figurehead under water and buried her sprit-sail-yard; and when she sunk her stern, her flying jib-boom stood up like the mizzenmast.
'When you've lost enough blood to see it in a lump, stab for it. "But my laugh was answered by a shriek. A man lashed with a turn of rope around his waist to the stump of the mizzenmast, was writhing and heaving on his back, while he struck with his knife, apparently at his own body. With my own knife in my hand I sprang toward him, and felt for what had seized him.
At last a sea came sweeping along, round the reef, and lifted us clear, right above the bulwarks, and free of the masts and spars still hanging over the side. We pulled away for our lives, and just saw the masts dragged down as the ship went to the bottom. The mizzenmast remained the last above water.
"I ain't licked yet not by a jugful," Scraggs snapped. "Halvorsen, haul down that signal halyard from the mizzenmast, take one end of it in your teeth, an' swim back to the Maggie with it. We'll fasten a heavier line to the signal halyard, bend the other end of the heavy line to the cable, an' haul the cable aboard with the Maggie's winch."
Then, there were the triangular jibs forward and the triangular staysails between the masts, with the quadrangular spanker like an aerial rudder on the lower mizzenmast. This is not the nautical way of saying it. But 'points' and 'corners' and other homely land terms sometimes save many explanations which, in their turn, lead on to other explanations.
While Shuffles had been teaching the "outsiders" the game of "Don't know Beans," Pelham, as officer of the deck, remained abaft the mizzenmast, and had failed to notice what was taking place in the waist. The officers who were off duty, and who had unconsciously voted for Shuffles, said nothing to those in charge of the ship.
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