- end_line
- 3372
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.270Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 3305
- text
- CHAPTER XXII.
WASH-DAY AND HOUSE-CLEANING IN A MAN-OF-WAR.
Besides the other tribulations connected with your hammock, you must
keep it snow-white and clean; who has not observed the long rows of
spotless hammocks exposed in a frigate’s nettings, where, through the
day, their outsides, at least, are kept airing?
Hence it comes that there are regular mornings appointed for the
scrubbing of hammocks; and such mornings are called
_scrub-hammock-mornings;_ and desperate is the scrubbing that ensues.
Before daylight the operation begins. All hands are called, and at it
they go. Every deck is spread with hammocks, fore and aft; and lucky
are you if you can get sufficient superfices to spread your own hammock
in. Down on their knees are five hundred men, scrubbing away with
brushes and brooms; jostling, and crowding, and quarrelling about using
each other’s suds; when all their Purser’s soap goes to create one
indiscriminate yeast.
Sometimes you discover that, in the dark, you have been all the while
scrubbing your next neighbour’s hammock instead of your own. But it is
too late to begin over again; for now the word is passed for every man
to advance with his hammock, that it may be tied to a net-like
frame-work of clothes-lines, and hoisted aloft to dry.
That done, without delay you get together your frocks and trowsers, and
on the already flooded deck embark in the laundry business. You have no
special bucket or basin to yourself—the ship being one vast wash-tub,
where all hands wash and rinse out, and rinse out and wash, till at
last the word is passed again, to make fast your clothes, that they,
also, may be elevated to dry.
Then on all three decks the operation of holy-stoning begins, so called
from the queer name bestowed upon the principal instruments employed.
These are ponderous flat stones with long ropes at each end, by which
the stones are slidden about, to and fro, over the wet and sanded
decks; a most wearisome, dog-like, galley-slave employment. For the
byways and corners about the masts and guns, smaller stones are used,
called _prayer-books;_ inasmuch as the devout operator has to down with
them on his knees.
Finally, a grand flooding takes place, and the decks are remorselessly
thrashed with dry swabs. After which an extraordinary implement—a sort
of leathern hoe called a “_squilgee_”—is used to scrape and squeeze the
last dribblings of water from the planks. Concerning this “squilgee,” I
think something of drawing up a memoir, and reading it before the
Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most curious affair.
By the time all these operations are concluded it is _eight bell’s_,
and all hands are piped to breakfast upon the damp and every-way
disagreeable decks.
Now, against this invariable daily flooding of the three decks of a
frigate, as a man-of-war’s-man, White-Jacket most earnestly protests.
In sunless weather it keeps the sailors’ quarters perpetually damp; so
much so, that you can scarce sit down without running the risk of
getting the lumbago. One rheumatic old sheet-anchor-man among us was
driven to the extremity of sewing a piece of tarred canvas on the seat
of his trowsers.
Let those neat and tidy officers who so love to see a ship kept spick
and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the man who chances
to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck, when the ship is rolling in a
sea-way; let all such swing their hammocks with the sailors; and they
would soon get sick of this daily damping of the decks.
- title
- Chunk 1