By eight o’clock, when it is daylight, Jim’s watch is over. He goes below, as seamen say, and sits down with his messmates—all the others in the crew who aren’t on watch—for a big breakfast of orange juice, bacon, eggs and flapjacks. Then he goes to sleep.
A little before noon he is up again. The storm was not a bad one. The sun is shining, and it is warm out on deck. Jim has all afternoon until four o’clock to himself. This is how he spends it: First he gets a bucket of cold water and puts it under a little faucet that brings up steam from the engine room. He runs steam into the water, and it’s hot in a few seconds. Out on the afterdeck, sailors have rigged up a washboard.
Jim spreads his dirty clothes on the board and scrubs them with a brush and soap and his steam-heated water. Seamen do a lot of washing. They like to keep their clothes clean. Often they do their own mending, too.
While Jim’s clothes dry on a regular clothesline on the afterdeck, he gets out his ditty bag which holds all kinds of odds and ends, including needles and thread and a sailor’s palm. The palm is what a sailor uses instead of a thimble for pushing a big needle through heavy canvas. In the old days when ships had sails to be mended, these palms were very necessary, but nowadays most sailors only use them the way Jim does. He is making a sea bag to take the place of his old one that has worn out. The sea bag is his trunk. He carries it on his shoulder whenever he changes ships.
While Jim sews, he sings, and other seamen who are off watch sing too. One of them plays a banjo, and another has a harmonica. Some of the songs are the ones you hear any day on the radio, and others are songs that seamen themselves have made up.
These sailor songs are called chanteys—pronounced shantys. On old sailing vessels men sang them as they worked together, and the rhythm of their work set the rhythm of the music. Here is a chantey that helped them pull together on the rope that lifted a sail:
Way! Haul away! We’ll haul away the bowline.
Way! Haul away! We’ll haul away, Joe.
In those days, before there were engines to do work, men used a hand-turned machine called a capstan to raise the anchor or tighten heavy lines. They turned it round and round by pushing against long bars called capstan bars. As they pushed, they sang: