All Sail Set by Armstrong Sperry

Author:Armstrong Sperry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher

CHAPTER VI

A PASSPORT FROM NEPTUNE—AND TROUBLE IN THE FOC’SLE

THE Flying Cloud had picked up the northeast trades. With this rousing breeze on her starboard quarter and every sail set from spanker to flying jib and drawing handsomely, she was laying knots behind her. Here, for 20 degrees of ocean, the wind hauls out of the east-northeast and blows scarcely shifting a hand’s breadth the year round. All hands had been sent aloft to set the stuns’ls, which added some fifteen feet to the ship’s wingspread. With the yards braced up just clear of the backstays, we fled south beneath a summer sky.

There was no need now to touch sheet or stay, and for that we greenhorns were grateful, for we had been serving an unrelenting apprenticeship under the watchful eyes of the mates: day and night loosing and setting sail, clewing up canvas and furling it, reefing tops’ls and courses, shaking out reefs, and mastheading the tops’ls to the rolling rhythm of the chanteys.

Flying fish weather, the oldsters were calling it, and the reason was not far to seek: flying fish fled in skimming shoals at our approach, the sun glinting on their glassy wings. Dolphins played about our bows, arching, leaping, diving in their sportive capers. Beautifully formed fish they were, whose glistening bodies threw back rainbow colors from sun and sky and sea.

The days now were a sheer delight. Running down the trades in a windship is to savor sea life at its finest: the incomparable blue of tropic water, shot through with arrows of dancing light; sea birds white against the sky, motionless save for the quick inquiring turn of their heads; the untroubled rim of the horizon, sharp as the edge of a sword where it cleaves the lighter blue of sky…. You who spend your lives in the pallid north can have but small idea of this rich warmth! Go and see it!

There was work to be done aplenty, for a ship—like a watch—is always out of repair, and it is part of a mate’s duty to see that no man is ever idle. But our watches on deck were no longer spent waist-deep in swirling water, struggling with stubborn ropes and blocks. Grand fun it was to be aloft on some gently swaying yard, two hundred feet above ship and ocean, glancing down occasionally at the wake stretching white and straight as far as eye could see, telling its story of a fine passage in the making. And birds darting low to look at you, their eyes bright with curiosity, their hoarse voices falling not unpleasantly on the ear. Aye, don’t read about it! Go and see it for yourselves!

Our heavier clothing had been put aside till it should be needed again in the sterner latitudes to the south. We were reduced to duck pants with or without undershirt, and our bare feet rejoiced in their deliverance from sodden boots and shoes. But the best interests of veracity compel the admission that this tropic

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