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Updated: June 4, 2025
They send me frivolous excuses that the skippers don't know the road to my islands, which is, after all, as easy to find as the way to Caen, for it is all one. I have also sent my own pilots; and I complain bitterly that by making this difficulty they will cause the loss of all Brittany.
Besides them there was quite a lot o' sailormen, even skippers and mates, nearly all of 'em smoking big cigars, too, and looking at Ginger out of the corner of one eye and at the Wapping Basher out of the corner of the other. "Hit 'ard and hit straight," ses the landlord to Ginger in a low voice, as they got out of the train and walked up the road. "'Ow are you feeling?"
This occurred especially at night, when the skippers, wishing to save their crews the trouble of making sail, would wait until daylight to do so. One evening a strange sail had been seen to the northward, and Captain Moubray had ordered the Ione to go in chase and ascertain her character, while he shortened sail so as to bring the Wolf on the weather quarter of most of the ships.
However, as I said, he's been square with me and it didn't take us long to get together on a proposition for combining our interests; I to furnish guns, ammunition, and as many men as possible, he to fix up a deal with the old party, do the scheming, and furnish a few hundred Indians. I've had the boat all ready for a long while, and Stubbs, one of Dad's old skippers, out for men.
Thus, in time, he had acquired a reputation for being unreliable and a wind-bag, with the result that skippers were chary of engaging him. Not to be too prolix, at the time Captain Scraggs made the disheartening discovery that he had to have a skipper for the Maggie, Mr. Gibney found himself reduced to the alternative of longshore work or a fo'castle berth in a windjammer bound for blue water.
Every time a boat used to land at Kandavu, the native niggers would have a white-man stew down on the beach, and it's got so that skippers give the island a wide berth." "Gib, my dear boy," chattered Captain Scraggs, "I'm a man of peace and I I " "Scraggsy, old stick-in-the-mud," said Mr. Gibney, laying an affectionate hand on the skipper's shoulder, "you're nothin' of the sort.
Thus, gradually, originated the traditional career of the men of this family, "a gray-headed shipmaster in each generation," as the often-quoted passage puts it, "retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast." But the most eminent among these hardy skippers is Daniel, the son of farmer Joseph, and grandfather of the author.
The navigation of the river although impeded and rendered dangerous by the forts which Parma held along the banks was still open; and, so long as the price of corn in Antwerp remained three or four times as high as the sum for which it could be purchased in Holland and Zeeland, there were plenty of daredevil skippers ready to bring cargoes.
He kept the peace with jealous skippers who resented the presence of a man they might command as mate, but whose views they were forced to listen to when he spoke as supercargo. He won the good-will of sea-bred Indians, and drove a good trade with them; he not infrequently brought his boat loaded with reeking skins back first to the plunging schooner.
On one occasion during a drunken quarrel in the coper's cabin one skipper threw the kerosene lamp over another lying intoxicated on the floor. His heavy wool jersey soaked in kerosene caught fire. He rushed for the deck, and then, a dancing mass of flames, leaped overboard and disappeared. Occasionally skippers devised punishments with a view to remedying the defects of character.
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