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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Strip your old tub down to a flying balloon-jib and a marline-spike, and ballast the Ark with elephants until every inch of her reeked with ivory and peanuts, and she'd outfoot you on every leg, in a cyclone or a zephyr.
To thrust 'Mr. Barrington into the hold was plainly impossible, even though transportation for seven years was his punishment. By an inspiration of luck he checked a mutiny, holding the quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with no weapon but a marline-spike. And hereafter, as he tells you in his 'Voyage to New South Wales, he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or go.
The place was almost like a museum in the variety of its contents; and they were not long in confiscating a dozen fathoms of three-inch rope, the remains of a coil of ratline, a small ball of spun-yarn for seizings, a sledge-hammer, an axe apiece, a marline-spike, a few long spike-nails, which Lance decided would be capital tools for the ladies to use in picking out the nuggets, and a few other trifling matters.
That was four years ago, and to-day Challis, who stands working at a little table set in against an open window, hammering out a ring from a silver coin on a marline-spike and vyce, whistles softly and contentedly to himself as he raises his head and glances through the vista of coconuts that surround his dwelling on this lonely and almost forgotten island.
Tom, you and the boy rouse the cable up get about ten fathoms on deck, and bend it. You'll find a bit of seizing and a marline-spike in the locker abaft." The sloop scudded before the gale, and in less than two hours was close to the headland pointed out by the master. "Now, Newton, we must hug the point or we shall not fetch clap on the main sheet here, all of us. Luff; you may handsomely.
As we walked with our faces forward I was amused by watching old Tom, who, marline-spike in hand, was stropping a block, now inspecting the work of one man, now that of another, and then giving his attention to a lad, seated on the spars stowed under the long-boat, engaged in splicing an eye to the end of a rope.
Nobody would have guessed from Bob's presentation now that he had ever been aloft on a dark night in the Atlantic, or knew the hundred ingenuities that could be performed with a rope's end and a marline-spike as well as his mother tongue. It was a day of days.
I know that I was taken with the sulks, and for days afterwards didn't speak to him or any one else; but as I had no wish to be killed, I did what I was ordered to do, and got on somewhat better. Ever since that not a day passes that I don't get a kick or have a marline-spike hove at my head by either the officers or men forward.
"It will put the purser's whiskers in curl if he gives them a turn round with a marline-spike. Don't you smell the earthy flavour of the sands of Africa?" "In truth I think I do," said Jenkins, the second lieutenant, one of a group who were collected on the weather side of the quarter-deck. "I can distinguish the lions' and boa-constrictors' breath in it, too, if I'm not mistaken.
I heard him say, too, one day, to a passenger who looked as if he had something to do with vessels, that if the captain had earned his own living, as he had, at the ropes, he would have known something or other from a marline-spike. He said, too, that ships never would be safe so long as captains who had never 'served up' were appointed over the heads of old salts, like himself.
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