The white men were all seamen, and so capsize and sing out were introduced into the lingo.
"He was one of your great seamen," the captain told me, "one of your shrewdest navigators, that d'Urville!
The seamen stripped off their heavy clothing, and went overboard; the captain and his son plunged in together and swam out of sight.
At the close of the Mexican War, our Government permitted Lieutenant Lynch to take ten seamen and two small boats and make this exploration.
And I was going to sea myself, to sea in a schooner, with a piping boatswain and pig-tailed singing seamen, to sea, bound for an unknown island, and to seek for buried treasure!
The hands in the launch shouted derisively, and I heard Montgomery curse at them; and then the captain, the mate, and one of the seamen helping him, ran me aft towards the stern.
In the same year he was commissioned Minister Plenipotentiary to England, and endeavored to conclude a convention for the protection of neutral rights, and against the impressment of seamen.
He was the first to fasten things together with glue; he invented the plumb-line and the auger; and he showed seamen how to put up masts in their ships and how to rig the sails to them with ropes.
The 'Ecliptic', with her cargo and crew, had completely disappeared, while the signalman, near at hand, slept peacefully, undisturbed by her crashing timbers, or the shouts of the drowning seamen.
The Dutch seamen were struck with horror, and went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest's rage.