DECISION IN A CAPTAIN.
One evening in the Gulf Stream just at dark the top-gallant sail was blowing adrift from the “gaskets,” (the ropes with which it was furled;) and the whole sail was likely to get loose. The captain said that it must be secured. The mate doubted if it was safe to send men aloft in such a gale. The captain replied that he had been obliged when he was before the mast to go aloft in worse weather. He could not spare the sail. The mate gave the order: “Go aloft, some of you, and make fast that top-gallant sail.” Six or eight men sprang into the rigging and soon the sail was furled.
The captain’s eye is necessarily the most of the time all over the ship. We were sitting on deck when the ship was laboring in a cross sea. He noticed that the main topmast stays quivered. The stays had within a few days all been “set up” for Cape weather, but these were not so taut as they should be. It was only a wakeful eye which would have noticed it. The remedy was applied at once. It is interesting to me as a father to hear the young captain spoken of by the sailors to each other as “the old man.” Had he a wife, though she were only eighteen years of age she would nevertheless be called “the old woman.” This made it less offensive to hear myself, though decidedly far from seventy, spoken of as “the old gentleman.”