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Updated: June 15, 2025
At dinner each night he played in the great cabin, while the captain drank his wine. The crew, or mariners, were divided into able seamen, ordinary seamen, grummets, or cabin-boys, ship-boys and swabbers. Swabbers were the weakest men of the crew; men, who were useless aloft, or at the guns, and therefore set to menial and dirty duties.
Two little ship-boys had been induced, by the fineness of the weather, to run up from below the moment they had dined, and were at play on the spare anchor to leeward, which overhangs the side of the ship. One of them fell overboard, which was seen from the quarter-deck, and the order was given to luff the ship into the wind.
Each morning at sunrise the ship-boys, according to custom, will sing 'Good Morrow' at the foot of the mainmast, and at sunset the 'Ave Maria. Since bad weather may interrupt the communications the watchword is laid down for each day in the week: Sunday, Jesus; the days succeeding, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity, Santiago, the Angels, All Saints, and Our Lady."*
All hands, unmoor! unmoor Hark to the hoarse, but welcome sound, Startling the seaman's sweetest slumbers. The groaning capstan's labouring round, The cheerful fife's enliv'ning numbers;. And ling'ring idlers join the brawl, And merry ship-boys swell the call, All hands, unmoor! unmoor! The cry is, "A sail! a sail!"
Two ship-boys and a baker feared not to seek death, and threw themselves into the sea, after having bid farewell to their companions in misfortune. Already the minds of our people were singularly altered; some believed that they saw land, others ships which were coming to save us; all talked aloud of their fallacious visions. We lamented the loss of our unfortunate companions.
A a ; I forget what you said was your usual appellation " "That might depend on circumstances. I have been known by different names in different situations However, if you call me Wilder, I shall not fail to answer." "Wilder!" a good name; though, I dare say, it would have been as true were it Wildone. You young ship-boys have the character of being a little erratic in your humours at times.
There were eighty-five men on board all told, fifty of them men-of-war, the rest young fellows, ship-boys and the like. Drake himself was treated with great reverence; a sentinel stood always at his cabin door. He dined alone with music. No mystery was made of the Pelican's exploits.
The former, Timothy Ebbs, was a little man, but he had a big voice and a prodigious pair of black whiskers, which, sticking out on either side of his face, gave him a sufficiently ferocious aspect to inspire ship-boys and other young members of the crew with the necessary amount of awe; while the able seamen respected him for his tried courage and undoubted nautical experience.
Then, she might be a companion to Walter, who might otherwise become as rough and rude as some ship-boys she had seen; not that it was his nature to be rough, she thought, but she had often written in her copy-book, "Evil communications corrupt good manners," and Walter's truly good manners might deteriorate among the rough crew of the whaler.
He turned to and worked like a horse: and with his own hands helped the men to rig parallel ropes a substitute for bulwarks till the perspiration ran down him. Bayliss now reported the well nearly dry, and Dodd was about to bear up and make sail again, when one of the ship-boys, a little fellow with a bright eye and a chin like a monkey's, came up to him and said "Please, captain!"
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