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Updated: June 8, 2025
I had been doing my best to become a seaman ever since I stepped on board, both by making myself acquainted with every manoeuvre performed, and learning the arts of knotting and splicing, reefing and steering, as well as studying navigation. The captain told me that he was well pleased with my progress, and this encouraged me to persevere.
And yet that storm-wind did not produce the same effect, as it would have produced, and is seen to produce every day on the strong, wide- spread canvas of some young navigator on the ocean of life, putting out into the open waters at the time when such storms are frequent. Every day we see such craft scudding with all sails spread before the blast without attempt at reefing or tacking.
The gear of these boats is exceedingly primitive. They do not understand reefing a sail, hence they are obliged to have no less than five different sizes, which they are constantly changing as occasion requires. They use a clumsy cogwheel for raising and lowering the sails, and do it all by main force, singing silly little distiches and screaming at the top of their voices as they haul the ropes.
There isn't a ship on the station can come up to us in reefing or furling; and, let them say what they like in other ships, there isn't a happier berth, or a better set of fellows to be found, on board any of them take my word for it, Duff." "Well, from all you say, I haven't a doubt but that I shall like the little Ione very much," observed the other.
In the construction of variable-surface machines, technical problems need to be faced which are unusually difficult. The theory with such craft is that their sustaining planes, either by a telescopic system, or by some process of reefing, are built so that they can be expanded or contracted at the will of the pilot.
"That reefing device is a winner!" young Winn cried, as he climbed out. "Did you see me at the start? I almost ran over the pigeon. Going some, dad! Going some! What did I tell you? Going some!" "But who is that with you?" his father demanded. The young man looked back at his prisoner and remembered. "Why, that's the pigeon-fancier," he said. "I guess the officers can take care of him."
"He ought to have given that order when the to'gallants were taken in!" "Better late than never, say I," said Mr Jellaby, laughing, as the topmen raced up the ratlines and the weather braces were rounded-in, preparatory to reefing. "Really, Stormcock, you're the most inveterate growler I have come across in the service since first I went to sea, by Jove!"
Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction; be recalled to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what not, rise to superintend the operations and then suddenly find she had lost her box.
This was the first time I had taken a weather earing, and I felt not a little proud to sit astride of the weather yard-arm, pass the earing, and sing out, ``Haul out to leeward! From this time until we got to Boston the mate never suffered any one but our own gang to go upon the mizzen topsail yard, either for reefing or furling, and the young English lad and I generally took the earings between us.
The lad was standing watching half a dozen men who were reefing a square sail high up on the mainmast, and the process gave him a peculiar sensation of moisture in the hands and chill in the back, for the men were standing upon a rope looped beneath the yard, and apparently holding on by resting the top button of their trousers upon this horizontal spar, their hands being fully occupied with hauling in and folding up the new stiff canvas of the sail.
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