Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
To feel all that and the rest of it to walk to the tops of your shoes in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and gaffs for yourself if you weren't sure who were going to spread the big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers, bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn't to stay so white forever to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so they'd stay, for by and by men's lives would depend on the way they hung on all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive with men jumping to their work skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers, lumpers, all thinking, talking, and, I suppose, dreaming of the season's work ahead m-m there was life for a man!
The Britannia was alongside, and we were getting under way. A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or variously engaged on the forecastle-head. Of the crew proper were two watches of fifteen men each. In addition were sailmakers, boys, bosuns, and the carpenter. Nearly forty men were they, but such men! They were sad and lifeless. There was no vim, no go, no activity.
Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands how to rig jury-masts how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of." Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist.
Carpenters sawing deals, sailmakers roping the foot of an old mainsail, servants passing to and fro with dishes, Lascars jabbering in their own language, British seamen d -g their eyes, as usual, in plain English, gave an idea of confusion and want of method to Newton Forster, which, in a short time, he acknowledged himself to have been premature in having conceived.
I noticed, though, Adams a little later on with a couple of men whom he requisitioned as sailmakers' mates busy cutting out queer little triangular pieces of canvas, which he told me were "storm staysails," the old ones having been blown away last voyage; while I saw that Tim Rooney, besides assuring himself of the security of the masts and setting up preventer stays for additional strength by the captain's orders, rigging up life- lines fore and aft, saying when I asked him what they were for, "To hould on wid, sure, whin we toombles into Cape weather, me darlint!"
But she had the hull for it, full and yet easy, with the greatest beam pretty well aft of the mainmast, and she drew fifteen and a half feet of water. I was still looking her over, her third day in the riggers' and sailmakers' hands, when Clancy came along. "Handsome, ain't she, and only needing a skipper and crew to be off on the Southern cruise, eh, Joe?" "That's all.
The shipyards shut down, the boats ready to launch were filled with water "for their preservation," and ship-carpenters, calkers, rope-makers, and sailmakers were thrown out of work. Much misery to the unemployed would have been the result but for the forethought of the patriot leaders. These men, early realizing the threatened hardship, called for help from the rest of the country.
C., took 50 pounds from Denison and 15 pounds from Ewart, the said voter being a chimney-sweeper, and favouring Mr. Denison with the weight of his influence and the honour of his suffrage. In looking over the list I find that the principal recipients of the good things going, were ropers, coopers, sailmakers, and shipwrights.
"His game was up, and he saw it; and Ebenezer Gryce's career had begun. "Like all destructive things the device by which I had been run into the river was simple enough when understood. In the first place it had been constructed to serve the purpose of a stairway and chute. The latter was in plain sight when it was used by the sailmakers to run the finished sails into the waiting yawls below.
We want every plank in her hull shaped from American trees, every sail of her woven by American looms, every man of her born of American parents, and we want it this way because we believe in American manufactures, because we believe in American shipbuilding, because we believe in American sailmakers, and because we believe in the intelligence and pluck and endurance and courage of the American sailor.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking