Brush round a French officers' mess once

Usage examples of gunroom.

The Bellona's barge was a fine spectacle, new painted, pulled by as neat a set of bargemen as any in the fleet, most of them Jack's followers from ship to ship, and steered by Bonden, grave, conscious of the occasion, in exactly the same rig as Tom Allen, Nelson's coxswain, whom he resembled, with Mr Wetherby beside him, an infant from the gunroom, who had to be shown how to deal with such ceremonies.

Its forward bulkhead was formed by the shelves where the officers' empty dunnage was stored and where Malachi Braithwaite had sought the memorandum on the day of his death, and the floor of the hole was made by the steeply sloping sides of the ship, and though Captain Chase had ordered that a patch of old sailcloth be placed in the hole to provide a rudimentary comfort, Lord William and Lady Grace were still forced to perch uncomfortably against the plank slopes beneath the small hatch that led to the gunroom on the orlop deck above.

The gentlemanly, but slightly Benthamite, gunroom were strict observers of the naval etiquette that prevented any subordinate from speaking to his captain without being spoken to first.

He could also have thanked them for a strong crew of able seamen and an entirely professional set of officers- Mowett and Rowan might be given to verse in the gunroom, but they were all hard tough driving prose on deck in an emergency.

When at last the evening gun boomed out and the bosun did pipe 'Stand by your hammocks', the first gust of the levanter came racing across the water with a low cloud of spray: it struck the Surprise from astern, a glancing blow that drove her foretop deep, so that she gave a sudden peck like a horse going over a hedge and finding the ground on the far side much lower than it had expected - a movement so violent that it flung Stephen and Jacob the length of the gunroom, together with their backgammon board, the dice and the men.

The gunroom messman had overheard Midshipman Piper telling Caswell what Seton had confided to him about his sister.

There was the distraction the counter irritation of submitting to the clumsy ministrations of Bailey, brought up from the gunroom mess.

He and his Knipperdolling friends removed all the lace and any ornament that could be taken for a mark of rank, and it was in these severe garments that he presented himself, on his promotion to acting second lieutenant, for his first dinner in the gunroom.

Vidal has left the ship with two of his Knipperdolling cousins, and he has been replaced in the gunroom by William Sadler, a thorough-going seaman.

Apart from the marine glue, flavoured with sherry and thickened with crushed biscuit, that began the feast, and a dwarfish fowl which Stephen carefully divided into four wizzened pieces that tasted of tar, and some of yesterday's dried peas, boiled in a cloth until they merged into a homogenous mass, it was exactly the same salt horse and biscuit that had nourished the gunroom, the midshipmen's berth, and the mess-deck a little earlier in the day.

Martin was of course a more suitable companion for Stephen in certain respects, but it seemed to Jack that he took up altogether too much of his time, prating away about primates in the mizen-top or endlessly turning over his collections of beetles and mummified toads in the gunroom.

There was no one in the gunroom at present apart from a seaman who was polishing the table and the foot of the mizenmast, which rose nobly through it half-way along, though Wilkins, whose watch had just been relieved, could be heard snoring in the aftermost larboard dog-hole.

It cost his spirit ration to prevail on the warrant cook to allow the gunroom attendant to heat a flatiron in the galley and iron out his neck handkerchief Bracegirdle lent him a clean shirt, but there was a feverish moment when it was discovered that the gunroom's supply of shoe blacking had dried to a chip.

Cosnahan was already greasy from his pudding in the midshipmen's berth before the gunroom had sat down to their boiled cod, and the cabin's meal was still no more than a remote, though not unpleasing, smell in the galley: Stephen had salivated in vain.

Even in very long voyages, when private stores were no more than memories and all hands were down to ship's provisions, the captain's cook would make a great effort to prepare the salt horse, dog's-body and hard tack rather differently from the gunroom cook.