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We used to take down all the ratlines, and make the darkies go up without them. In doing this, they took the rigging between the great and second toe, and walked up, instead of shinning it, like Christians. This soon gave them sore toes, and they would beg hard to have the ratlines replaced. On the whole, they were easily managed, and were respectful and obedient.
She sails like a witch, I am told, and is a wonderfully powerful vessel, just the sort of craft to give a smart, young fellow like yourself every chance to race up the ratlines of promotion. So now, all that you have to do is to arrange somehow to be relieved of your present command as soon as possible, and then to step into your new berth."
Half-dazed and sullenly savage Black had still sense enough to reflect that it would be little use to expect that the harassed mate would listen to reason then. Clawing his way up the ratlines he laid his chest upon the main-topsail-yard and worked his way out to the lower end of the long inclined spar.
After an intolerable while, the last ratlines snapped like pistol shots, the whizzing end of a rope struck a sailor and laid him out as if clubbed, then the foremast fell away and the Vulcan rushed forward again. "Look ahead, Madden!" shouted Caradoc in the uproar. "We've got to run among thicker fields than these!"
In spite of this Mr Gregory one day ordered him aloft, and the poor fellow managed to get up as high as the mainmast head, when he seemed entirely to lose his nerve, and, letting his legs slip in between the shrouds, he clung there with his hands clutching the ratlines, and holding on for life.
I began to feel somewhat easier, and cried aloud that the first of them who came up after me would go down again in two pieces. Despite my warning a brace essayed to climb the ratlines, as pitiable an attempt as ever I witnessed, and fell to the deck again. 'Twas a miracle that they missed falling into the sea.
They have known what it is to be short of victuals five hundred miles from land with contrary winds; they have experienced the delights of a summer at New Orleans, waiting for a cargo and being eaten alive by mosquitoes; they have looked up, in January, at the ice-sheeted rigging, when boiling water froze upon the shrouds and ratlines, and the captain said that no man could lay out upon the top-sail yard, though the north-easter threatened to blow the sail out of the bolt-ropes but Ruggiero got hold of the lee earing all the same and Sebastiano followed him, and the captain swore a strange oath in the Italo-American language, and went aloft himself to help light the sail out to windward, being still a young man and not liking to be beaten by a couple of beardless boys, as the two were then.
He arose, breathing guttural but incomprehensible denunciations against his tormentor, who escaped from his clutches by nimbly running up the ratlines to the foretop, where he could safely indulge his merriment over the wrath of the Dutchman. I was often amused at the ingenious manner in which Jonas managed to get over a difficulty.
"Take it aisy, me darlint," shouted Tim after me as I rushed up the poop ladder and swung myself into the shrouds; but, I was half-way up the ratlines before he could get out the end of his exordium, "Aisy does it!"
The animal, beating the air with his heavy paws, was trying to clutch Vasling; he retiring little by little on the barricading, was apparently doomed, when a second shot was heard. The bear fell. André Vasling raised his head and saw Louis Cornbutte in the ratlines of the mizen-mast, his gun in his hand. Louis had shot the bear in the heart, and he was dead.
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