“Tarring down,” already mentioned, and now repeated because the
operation is renewed as the vessel is coming near to port, is to a
landsman an animating sight. Every rope in the standing rigging,
beginning aloft, feels the smearing process, which is carried on
without gloves. The stays, which run between the masts at an angle of
forty-five degrees, are reached at every point by the boys, each in
what is called a boatswain’s chair, not unlike the seat of a swing;
in which he is lowered at his call by a boy or the mate on deck, who
belays him at each descent a few feet at a time. Often have I watched
these boys suspended sixty feet above the deck, wiping the rope with
the sopping rags which they dip in the tar-bucket till they reach the
deck; and I have thought what a sight one of these boys would be to
his mother,--her pet besmeared with tar from head to foot, one suit
of his clothes, kept for the occasion, doomed to go overboard after
the tarring down near port, the boy feeling an honest pride as he
illustrates in his work the dignity of labor. But perhaps the mother’s
heart would yearn towards her child more than when she should see him
in “the boatswain’s chair,” on seeing him at his meals. I repeat it, he
has no table. He goes to the galley with his tin pot; the cook gives
him his portion of tea or coffee, sweetened with molasses; the boy cuts
a piece of beef from out the mess-kid, gets a piece of “hard-tack”
from the “bread barge,” sits down on deck, or on a spare spar, lays his
tin pan beside him, and with his sheath-knife and fingers despatches
his “grub.” Many at their rich mahogany tables loaded with China-ware
and silver would give it all for the boy’s appetite and power of
digestion.