Читать книгу Round the Galley Fire онлайн

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Some time ago, when the Queen was at Osborne, her Majesty visited a troopship in her yacht the Alberta. Her Majesty’s ship Hector, lying in Cowes Roads, manned yards in honour of the royal presence. One of the men got as high as the main truck and stood upon it. The main truck is a small circular platform—varying in diameter, of course, according to the size of the ship—fixed on the royal masthead, the highest point of the mast. Sometimes it has holes in it, through which halliards are rove for hoisting flags. The trucks of the Hector, I was told, are furnished with iron staffs, so that the sailor who stood on the main truck had something to lay hold of. But this diminishes nothing of the wonder of the feat. The nerve required coolly to stand upon a small circumference at a prodigious elevation is one thing; the more extraordinary feature of that achievement lies, it would strike a landsman, in the man’s getting over and on to the truck, and then kneeling and swinging himself off it and down upon the royal rigging. In the fine old song of the “Leap for Life,” the skipper’s son gets upon the main truck and stands there, holding on with his eyelids. To save his life he is ordered to jump, and the dog follows him overboard and picks him up. The order to that boy was a sensible one, for though it is perfectly true that he had managed to get upon the truck, it was really impossible that he should get off it without falling.