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Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast.
It was a long and severe struggle still, to contend successfully with the high sea which was running, but the boat was finally brought on the lee side of the vessel, the stout ropes were made fast to the ring-bolts in its stem and stern, and with all on board it was quickly run up to the davits.
On our arrival at Samarang, the mate got a doctor from a Dutch frigate, to look at me, who declared nothing ailed me. By these means nearly all hands in the ship were set against me, but my four companions, and the little boy fancying that I was a skulk, and throwing labour on them. I was ordered on deck, and set to work graffing ring-bolts for the guns.
An enemy nearly always directs his shot at this point in order to cut away the mast. The beams and carlines were spattered with blood and brains. About the hatchways it looked like a butcher's stall; bits of human flesh were sticking in the ring-bolts.
The breechings of the guns on each deck were bowsed up and the side tackle falls hove taut and frapped, with preventer tackles rigged and secured round the brackets at the after part of the carriages and hooked to the ring-bolts in the ship's side; all the guns' crews assisting in this task, and the marines and idlers tailing on to the falls and hauling away at the sound of the boatswain's pipe and only stopping pulling at the order being given "Avast heaving!"
What! hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then.
Ben Boltrope who had been having a confab with the darkey, and probably a "drop of something hot," his special failing, in the galley when the sea washed over the ship and fetched it away was promptly at hand to help his sable friend; when the galley was reinstated in its proper place, and so tightly lashed down to the ring-bolts that a sea would have had to carry away the deck itself to have lifted it again.
The skylight I secured as well as I could by passing lashings over the cover to a couple of ring-bolts conveniently placed in the deck, and I finished up by backing the companion doors with a couple of stout pieces of timber, which I sawed to the proper length and wedged in between the uprights, rendering it practically impossible for the doors to be forced open by a sea, while, by drawing over the slide, I could at the last moment effectually close all access to the cabin.
Suffice it to say that during the whole of that time they were never released from the ring-bolts to which they were chained; that they lay there on the hard planking day and night, alternately scorched by the fierce rays of the noonday sun, and chilled by the heavy dews of night; that they were sparingly and irregularly fed and then only upon the coarsest and most loathsome of food and still more sparingly and irregularly supplied with water; that they were the recipients of incessant abuse and brutality from the wretches who were in possession of the ship; and some slight conception can be formed of their dreadful state of body and mind during that interminable three weeks.
The inside was then painted, from the skysail truck to the waterways the yards black; mast-heads and tops, white; monkey-rail, black, white, and yellow; bulwarks, green; plank-shear, white; waterways, lead color, etc., etc. The anchors and ring-bolts, and other iron work, were blackened with coal-tar; and the steward kept at work, polishing the brass of the wheel, bell, capstan, etc.
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