Yo, heave ho! Round the capstan go.
Heave, men, with a will. Tramp, and stamp it still!
The anchor must be weighed, the anchor must be weighed.
Yo-ho! Heave ho! Yo-ho! Heave ho!
Now, while the singing goes on, Jim takes his turn at having a haircut. For a barber’s chair he uses a bitt. That’s a round piece of steel that sticks up out of the deck at just the right height. It’s used at times for holding big ropes that seamen call hawsers.
The barber is a man from the black gang. That means he works in the engine room. When he is off watch, he likes to make a little extra money cutting hair. So he puts a sheet around Jim and starts to work. Chiquita, the ship’s cat, takes a playful swipe at a dangling corner of the sheet, and then goes off in search of a rat that may have come aboard in port.
The barber has pictures tattooed on his forearms, and Jim laughs as he watches them. On one arm is a picture of an old sailing ship. As the barber’s muscles move, they make the ship look as if wind is blowing on the sails. On the other arm is a beautiful lady chasing butterflies. When the barber opens and closes the scissors, the lady looks as if she is dancing after the butterflies.
Just before four o’clock, Jim goes to mess again. Then he’s on watch for four more hours to put in the rest of his eight hours of work in a twenty-four hour day. He stands lookout again for two hours and takes the wheel for two more. Now his day is done.
SEA LANGUAGE
When Jim first went to sea, he found that seamen speak a language of their own. A floor is always a deck. A partition between rooms is a bulkhead. A ceiling is the overhead. Stairs are always a ladder. The opening onto a deck at the head of the steps is a companionway. Almost all ropes are called lines.
One day another seaman said to Jim: “The bosun wants you to break out the handy billy in the forepeak and take it aft to Chips. He’s abaft the mizzenmast.” This is what all those words mean: