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The muskets were accordingly brought on deck and loaded, while every man who had not a musket served out to him took care to provide himself with a weapon of some sort, even though it were no more formidable than a belaying pin.
He, an untrained sailor, could not keep his footing there in a storm, and it could be said that it was an accident, as it would be in the fulfilment though not in the intent. But he divined something else that stopped the mental shudder and that gave him renewed hope. Why should the captain threaten him with a belaying pin if he did not stay in the cook's galley for two days?
He accordingly came forward, turned all hands to, with tackles on the stays and backstays, coming up with the seizings, hauling here, belaying there, and full of business, standing between the knight-heads to sight the mast, when the captain came forward, and also began to give orders. This made confusion, and the mate left his place and went aft, saying to the captain:
After a few days' hard buffeting against a biting head-wind, the vessel arrived at the port to which she was bound, and after she was moored and everything made trim, running gear coiled round the belaying pins, every bight being regular and equal, sails stowed in a cloth, and yards laid perfectly square, the sailors then proceeded to arrange themselves in spotless white fustian trousers and blue jerseys adorned in front with their names or initials worked in red or white worsted.
Few words were spoken between the watches as they shifted, the wheel was relieved, the mate took his place on the quarter-deck, the look-outs in the bows; and each man had his narrow space to walk fore and aft in, or, rather, to swing himself forward and back in, from one belaying pin to another, for the decks were too slippery with ice and water to allow of much walking.
“Very well, Kanaka,” says the boatswain. “I will try; but if you are having your fun out of me, I will take my fun out of you with a belaying pin.” So the whaler-man went off up the avenue; and Keawe stood and waited. It was near the same spot where Kokua had waited the night before; but Keawe was more resolved, and never faltered in his purpose; only his soul was bitter with despair.
On the second day after the wounding of Black Michael, Clayton came on deck just in time to see the limp body of one of the crew being carried below by four of his fellows while the first mate, a heavy belaying pin in his hand, stood glowering at the little party of sullen sailors.
As they passed the ship's bell, Dick stretched towards the belaying pin that was still lying on the deck, seized it, and hit the bell a mighty bang. It was the last pleasure to be snatched before sleep, and he snatched it.
"Then I needed to think of my own safety and passed a turn of the mizzen gaff-topsail downhaul about me, belaying to a pin as the cataclysm hit us. For the next two minutes although it seemed an hour, I did not speak, nor breathe, nor think, unless my instinctive grip on the turns of the downhaul on the pin may have been an index of thought.
The Nuestra looked clean as a pin and fresh as a maker's model. Her decks had been scrubbed until the caulking in the seams looked like lines of black paint on old ivory. Her standing rigging had been newly tarred, her bright work polished, and the water casks lashed in the waist had their hoops painted a bright yellow, not yet dry. New hemp hung in the belaying pins.
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