Ship ropes that serve as steps

Usage examples of ratlines.

So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin.

The hands went hurrying up the ratlines, Hornblower watching keenly to see what proportion of them were vague about their stations and duties.

He had no idea what he was going to do, but it was a healing mechanical exercise to set himself to descend the rigging, to lodge first one foot and then the other upon the ratlines, to make sure that despite the weakness he felt he accomplished the descent in safety.

They began shouting rude things to him from various tops and ratlines, trying to provoke him.

Jack and Vrej were up in the ratlines while Padraig, who had lost his left leg during a corsair-attack around Hainan Island, was stomping around on a hand-carved peg-leg of jacaranda wood, humming to himself and pulling on ropes as necessary.

Malabaris had suspended themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.

He climbed the lower ratlines which were easy for they leaned like a ladder against the mast, but then he came to the place where the futtock shrouds went out and backward above his head.

Then, halfway to the maintop's platform, his feet slipped off the ratlines and he hung there, suspended fifty feet above the deck, and he felt his fingers, hooked like claws, slipping on the wet ropes and he dared not swing his legs for fear of falling and so he stayed, paralyzed by fear, until a topman, swinging down through the web of rigging with the agility of a monkey, grabbed his waistband and hauled him into the maintop.

He climbed the rain-soaked ratlines, negotiated the lubber's hole and trained his telescope north, but he could see nothing except a wind-broken sea and a mass of clouds on the horizon.

Chase shouted, pointing beyond his own stern, and Montmorin climbed up his mizzen ratlines to see over the Pucelle's poop and there, ghosting across the swells, untouched, was the Spartiate, a British seventy-four, the French-built ship that was rumored to be bewitched because she sailed faster by night than by day and now.

Then, halfway to the maintop’s platform, his feet slipped off the ratlines and he hung there, suspended fifty feet above the deck, and he felt his fingers, hooked like claws, slipping on the wet ropes and he dared not swing his legs for fear of falling and so he stayed, paralyzed by fear, until a topman, swinging down through the web of rigging with the agility of a monkey, grabbed his waistband and hauled him into the maintop.

Tom Connors, the signal lieutenant, was halfway up the mizzen ratlines where he gazed through a glass at the Euryalus which was flying a string of bright flags from her mizzen yard.

He climbed the rain-soaked ratlines, negotiated the lubber’s hole and trained his telescope north, but he could see nothing except a wind-broken sea and a mass of clouds on the horizon.

He climbed frantically up three more ratlines and then said, "I can't read the hoist, sir!

His greater height above sea level gave him a marginally better view, but the humans could see the oncoming sails themselves, and everyone who could had climbed the ratlines for a better look.