Читать книгу Mutiny on the Bounty. Historical Novel онлайн

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While I waited for Bligh in the uproar, I diverted myself in studying the rigging of the Bounty. Born and brought up on the west coast of England, I had loved the sea from childhood and lived amongst men who spoke of ships and their qualities as men gossip of horses elsewhere. The Bounty was ship-rigged, and to a true landsman her rigging would have seemed a veritable maze of ropes. But even in my inexperience I knew enough to name her sails, the different parts of her standing rigging, and most of the complex system of halliards, lifts, braces, sheets, and other ropes for the management of sails and yards. She spread two headsails—foretopmast-staysail and jib; on fore and main masts she carried courses, topsails, topgallants, and royals, and the mizzenmast spread the latter three sails. That American innovation, the cross jack, had not in those days been introduced. The cross jack yard was still, as the French say, a vergue sèche,—a barren yard,—and the Bounty’s driver, though loose at the foot, was of the gaff-headed type, then superseding the clumsy lateen our ships had carried on the mizzen for centuries.