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Updated: June 16, 2025
Softly rising, I stole through a port-hole, and left the venerable worshipper alone. He was a sheet-anchor-man, an earnest Baptist, and was well known, in his own part of the ship, to be constant in his solitary devotions in the chains. He reminded me of St. Anthony going out into the wilderness to pray.
While a crowd of people was gathered about the forward part of the booms, a sudden cry was heard from below; a lieutenant came running forward to learn the cause, when an old sheet-anchor-man, standing by, after touching his hat hitched up his waistbands, and replied, "I don't know, sir, but I'm thinking as how one o' them 'ere kings has been tumblin' down the hatchway."
Now the master-at-arms, assisted by his mates, the ship's corporals, reigns supreme in these bowels of the ship. Throughout the night these policemen relieve each other at standing guard over the premises; and, except when the watches are called, they sit in the midst of a profound silence, only invaded by trumpeters' snores, or the ramblings of some old sheet-anchor-man in his sleep.
In sunless weather it keeps the sailors' quarters perpetually damp; so much so, that you can scarce sit down without running the risk of getting the lumbago. One rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was driven to the extremity of sewing a piece of tarred canvas on the seat of his trowsers.
No, no; I am a good Christian, White-Jacket, and love my enemy too much to drop his acquaintance." It may be readily imagined, therefore, what consternation and dismay pervaded the gun-deck at the first announcement of the tidings that the grog was expended. "The grog gone!" roared an old Sheet-anchor-man. "Oh! Lord! what a pain in my stomach!" cried a Main-top-man.
A knowing old sheet-anchor-man, an unprincipled fellow, putting this, that, and the other together, ferrets out the mystery; and straightway resolves to reap the goodly harvest which the cockswain has sowed. He seeks him out, takes him to one side, and addresses him thus: "Cockswain, you have been smuggling off some red-eye, which at this moment is in your barge at the booms.
Hence, the old seamen stationed in that part of a man-of-war are called sheet-anchor-man. "I never go aloft, and don't intend to fall overboard," replied Bungs. "Don't believe it!" cried the sheet-anchor-man; "you lopers that live about the decks here are nearer the bottom of the sea than the light hand that looses the main-royal. Mind your eye, Bungs mind your eye!"
"There, Bungs!" cried Scrimmage, a sheet-anchor-man, "there's a good pattern for you; make us a brace of life-buoys like that; something that will save a man, and not fill and sink under him, as those leaky quarter-casks of yours will the first time there's occasion to drop 'ern.
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