“No you don’t,” shouted up the instructor after him. “You must climb out by the futtock shrouds, as every proper sailor does.”
Seeing, however, that poor ‘Ugly’ was quite in a fog, he turned to me as I stepped down from the chains and stood up in front of him, touching my cap to report myself as having accomplished my task.
“I say, my boy,” said he, “what’s your name?”
Of course I had to reply to this, and so I told him—
“Tom Bowling, sir.”
“Ha!” he exclaimed, apparently surprised. “Any relation of that chap in the song who ‘went aloft and did his duty’?”
I grinned.
“Yes, sir, I believe so,” I said. “Father says as how our family is descended from him.”
“I can quite believe it,” observed the instructor kindly, with a pleasant smile on his face. “At all events, a sailor’s blood runs in your veins, my lad; and, as you’re such a good climber and know your way up the ratlines, just go up now and show that lubber of a greenhorn how to get up the futtock shrouds without tumbling, and so over the masthead.”
Accordingly, I raced aloft the second time and soon fetched up to ‘Ugly,’ who, in a mortal funk, was trying to step out from the lower rigging on to the futtock shrouds, which, I may explain for the benefit of those who have not been to sea, stretch out laterally from the mast, and not in towards it, like the ordinary standing rigging below.