it breaks loose just as the men expect it to
be fast, when away it goes, with awful suddenness and force, dragging
them clean overboard before their instinctive grip can be let go. The
slightest inattention to the seas may mean an equally fatal result.
Not once, nor twice, but several times, a whole watch has been washed
away from the fore-braces by some gigantic wave, and every single man
in it been drowned.

Squalls need smart handling. Black squalls are nothing, even when the
ship lays over till the lee rail's under a sluicing rush of broken
water. But a really wicked white squall {110} requires luffing, that
is, bringing her head so close to the wind that it will strike her at
the acutest angle possible without losing its pressure in the right
direction altogether. The officer of the watch keeps one eye to
windward, makes up his mind what sail he'll shorten, and then yells an
order that pierces the wind like a shot, 'Stand by your royal
halliards!' As the squall swoops down and the ship heels over to it he
yells again, 'Let go your royal halliards, clew 'em up and make 'em
fast!' Down come the yards, with hoarse roaring from the thrashing
canvas. But then, if no second squall is coming, the mate will cut the
clewing short with a stentorian 'Masthead the yards again!' on which
the watch lay on to the halliards and haul--_Ahay_! _Aheigh_!
_Aho--oh_! Up she goes!

The labour is lightened, as hand labour always has been lightened, by
singing to the rhythm of the work. The seaman's working songs are
chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling
music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very
savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of
chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them,
have met and mingled all round the {111} world. They are the folklore
of a class apart, which differs, as landsmen differ, in ways and speech
and racial ambition, but which is also drawn together, as landsmen
never have been, by that strange blend of strife and communing with man
and nature which is only known at sea. They will not bear quotation in
cold print, where they are as pitiably out of place as an albatross on
deck. No mere reader can feel the stir of that grand old chanty

Hurrah! my boys, we're homeward bound!

unless he has heard it when all hands make sail on leaving port, and
the deck begins pulsating with the first thro