United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Seize that rope's-end and hold on for your life! A long line of milk-white foam appears upon the horizon, spreading and advancing with awful rapidity; the roar swells in volume until it becomes absolutely deafening; the air grows thick with vapour; a sudden whirl of wind rushes past lashing the skipper's face with rain-drops as it goes rain-drops? no; they are salt, salt as the brine alongside and then, with a wild burst and babel of hideous sound and a shock as though the raft had collided with something solid, the hurricane strikes her.
So we got wondering what Old Goss was doing at Yarmouth, and what was keeping him, and whether he'd come aboard drunk or sober, and whether he'd blow us up, and whether he'd rope's-end us, which was as likely as not, or perhaps more.
"All of it, to be sure: the birch, the cane, the thong, the ferula, the rope's-end, all Gnawbit's little toys?" I told him, weeping, that I was very, very unhappy, and that I would like to drown myself. "That's wrong, that's wicked," observed the Old Gentleman with a chuckle; "you mustn't drown yourself, because then you'd lose your chance of being hanged.
Never for a moment was he idle, for he always found something which ought to be done; each rope's-end was pointed; his rigging was never chafed; and the moment any service was wanted he put it on. Thus a couple of years passed by, Dame Lanreath and Nelly setting out day after day to sell the fish or lobsters and crabs he caught, for which they seldom failed to obtain a good price.
If he did use a rope's-end on the backs of the boys sometimes, it was all for their own good. We were bound out one winter time to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It isn't the pleasantest time of the year to be sailing across the North Atlantic. We had had a pretty long passage, with westerly gales, which kept all hands employed. The boatswain was seldom off deck, and a rough life he had of it.
I went to the gangway, and held out my hand to assist my father in over our low bulwarks, whilst Bob hove the end of a coil of line into the canoe, shouting to the blacks, "Now then, darkies, look out, and catch a turn with this here rope's-end, will ye? for if you goes astarn, you'll have all your work afore ye to overhaul us and get alongside again."
A cabin-boy's berth means dirt to live in, offal to eat, a man's work on a boy's shoulders, and the rope's-end at regular intervals. The vessel touched at a port in the Hebrides. I was as ungrateful as usual to my best benefactors; I ran away again. Some women found me, half dead of starvation, in the northern wilds of the Isle of Skye.
Ireland's contribution to the fleet, apart from the notoriously disaffected, was of too much consequence to be played with; for the Irishman was essentially a good-natured soul, and when his native indolence and slowness of movement had been duly corrected by a judicious use of the rattan and the rope's-end, his services were highly esteemed in His Majesty's ships of war.
Jeppe conjures up his apprentice years in the capital, and tells of the great bankruptcy; he goes right back to the beginning of the century, to a wonderful old capital where the old people wore wigs, and the rope's-end was always at hand and the apprentices just kept body and soul together, begging on Sundays before the doors of the townsfolk. Ah, those were times!
I once more resigned the wheel to Miss Onslow's hand, with strict injunctions to her not to leave it or attempt to get a peep at the interior of the boat, on any account, and then went forward to prepare a rope's-end to drop into her as we drew up alongside.
Word Of The Day