TARRING DOWN.
“Tarring down,” already mentioned, and now repeated because the operation is renewed as the vessel is coming near to port, is to a landsman an animating sight. Every rope in the standing rigging, beginning aloft, feels the smearing process, which is carried on without gloves. The stays, which run between the masts at an angle of forty-five degrees, are reached at every point by the boys, each in what is called a boatswain’s chair, not unlike the seat of a swing; in which he is lowered at his call by a boy or the mate on deck, who belays him at each descent a few feet at a time. Often have I watched these boys suspended sixty feet above the deck, wiping the rope with the sopping rags which they dip in the tar-bucket till they reach the deck; and I have thought what a sight one of these boys would be to his mother,—her pet besmeared with tar from head to foot, one suit of his clothes, kept for the occasion, doomed to go overboard after the tarring down near port, the boy feeling an honest pride as he illustrates in his work the dignity of labor. But perhaps the mother’s heart would yearn towards her child more than when she should see him in “the boatswain’s chair,” on seeing him at his meals. I repeat it, he has no table. He goes to the galley with his tin pot; the cook gives him his portion of tea or coffee, sweetened with molasses; the boy cuts a piece of beef from out the mess-kid, gets a piece of “hard-tack” from the “bread barge,” sits down on deck, or on a spare spar, lays his tin pan beside him, and with his sheath-knife and fingers despatches his “grub.” Many at their rich mahogany tables loaded with China-ware and silver would give it all for the boy’s appetite and power of digestion.