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Updated: May 17, 2025
However, he reached the point as which he aimed, but he had not been there a minute before he heard that peculiar sound of heavy blocks working, cheep, cheep, cheep. He made out clearly the tall pointed lateen sails of the felucca rising from her decks, and then the sound of the windlass working reached his ears; while a breeze, not felt below and every moment increasing, fanned his cheeks.
Tackles being secured to the maintop, were brought to the windlass, when one of the crew being lowered on to the body of the whale with a huge hook in his hand, he fixed it into a hole cut for the purpose in the "blanket," or outer covering, near the head.
The windlass recommenced its creaking, and the figure at the end of the rope continued its slow, upward journey. Hugh saw the body hauled slowly to the top and grabbed by a strong hand; then it disappeared, and the sunlight once more streamed, uninterrupted, down the shaft. The bucket came down again, and Hugh clutched it and yelled out, "Haul away!"
Then, after another delay when Jack imagined he had caught a suspicious little scratching sound, as of something moving, they drew up on hands and knees alongside what seemed to be a rustic shelter covering an opening with a real windlass, rope and all, to fill Perk's heart with joy in the belief that his throat was in a fair way of having its roughness relieved in short order.
As the ship, in the solid floe, set to the north-west, the cables rattled and tore at the hawse-pipes; luckily the anchors, lying as they were on a strip-sloping bottom, came away easily, without damage to windlass or hawse-pipes. Slowly as we disappeared into Sound, the light in the hut died away. At 11.30 p.m. the ice around us started to break up, the floes playing tattoo on the ship's sides.
The more nearly we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as caprice or selfishness turns the windlass. Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any.
D'ye get that? Now get out. Get along for'ard to the windlass." Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved aft. "What do you make of them?" I queried. "The limit," he grunted. "I know their kidney. They've done time, the three of them. They're just plain sweepings of hell " Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on Number Two hatch.
Looking round upon my companions, I saw that Peters still lived, although a thick line was pulled so forcibly around his loins as to give him the appearance of being cut nearly in two; as I stirred, he made a feeble motion to me with his hand, pointing to the rope. Augustus gave no indication of life whatever, and was bent nearly double across a splinter of the windlass.
So small was the Parki, that one hand could brace the main-yard; and a very easy thing it was, even to hoist the small top-sails; for after their first clumsy attempt to perform that operation by hand, they invariably led the halyards to the windlass, and so managed it, with the utmost facility. Still many days passed and the Parki yet floated.
If one of these should catch under an overlapping armour-plate it could be connected with the steam windlass of the Adamant, and a plate might be ripped off or a crab overturned. But the crabs proved to be much more lively fish than their enemies had supposed. Turning, as if on a pivot, and darting from side to side, they seemed to be playing with the boats, and not trying to get away from them.
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