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Updated: May 17, 2025
"Go up with the crew now." The boy slipped into the crowd that lay around the windlass as unobstrusively as he could. A thick-set, bearded man with a great hairy chest, bare to the yellow sash at his waist, was speaking. "Ay," he said, "a hundred Indians was dead in the town before ever we landed.
Peckham was uttering these words in his thin, shallow whine, twanging up into the frontal sinuses. What was the use of losing his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among the consequences which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor lady-teacher without a friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand on the grand-inquisitor before the windlass of his rack had taken one turn too many?
He looked hastily through the mail, and was glad to see that it included a notification from the freight department of the railroad that a windlass consigned to "T. Grimshaw" had arrived and was awaiting his orders. "I'll just drop around to see Peters and set his mind at rest about that windlass," he said to Winters, reaching for his hat. "I thought you did that yesterday," replied Winters.
Fastening one end of a heavy tackle to the windlass, and with the other end fast to the butt of the foretopmast, I began to heave. Maud held the turn on the windlass and coiled down the slack. We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted. It was an improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous.
The chains were attached to the windlass, the sailors worked away at the handspikes, and at four o'clock in the afternoon the "Chancellor" was in motion. High tide would be at twenty minutes past four, and at ten minutes before that time the ship had been hauled as far as her sea-range would allow; her keel grazed the ridge, and her progress was arrested.
Hand me down that other pick, fer this wan is no sharper than me foot." He worked steadily after that, flinging up the moist soil with an asperated "a-ah" that punctuated regularly each heave of his shoulder muscles. In a little he climbed out and helped Mike rig a windlass over the hole. Mike pottered a good deal, and stood often staring vacantly, studying the next detail of their work.
The captain and chief mate jumped on deck, and found the crew had got the cook laid on the windlass, and were giving him a most severe cobbing with a flat piece of his own fire wood.
Dusk too impended, and as the rope began to coil on the windlass at the signal to hoist every eye was strained to discern the identity of the first voyagers in this aerial journey, the two children, securely lashed to the chair. This was well, all felt that both parents might best wait, might risk the added delay.
The sensation was strange and exhilarating. Looking up I could only see the small opening I came through, and a straggling stream of light poured down that, but on all sides profound darkness reigned supreme. A spark-like light my son lit, reminded me of the lost Pleiad. About twenty-five or thirty feet from the top I caught sight of a scene that made me call on the men at the windlass to stop.
Smoke turned it with a minimum of effort, and the rope slipped and creaked. "Now, Shorty, you go outside and tell me what it sounds like." Shorty, listening at the closed door, heard all the sounds of a windlass hoisting a load, and caught himself unconsciously attempting to estimate the depth of shaft out of which this load was being hoisted.
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