What is "fo'c'sle"

Usage examples of "fo'c'sle".

The wind was tearing great gouts of water off the wave-tops, driving the atomised spray at bullet speed against fo'c'sle and sides.

For a moment, the billowing fog on the fo'c'sle cleared, atomised by the intense heat and flash generated by the exploding cordite.

On the deck immediately above, Hartley and two seamen, belayed with ropes, had made a brief, hopelessly gallant attempt to plug the gaping holes: all three, battered into near senselessness by the great waves pounding the fo'c'sle, were dragged off within a minute.

The score or so of right seamen had been at their stations ten minutes - Pullings and the bosun on the fo'c'sle, the gunner and his mates at the maintack, the carpenter at the foresheet, the Marines at the mainsheet, the maintopmen and the after-guard on the quarterdeck, at the braces - before the last desperate half-clothed bewildered landsman was hunted up, shoved and beaten and cobbed into his place.

The gunner was running up from below to ask for the key to the magazine and Bowen, the surgeon, who had apparently been dozing on the fo'c'sle, was hurrying below to set out his instruments.

Lockhart's position at Action Stations was on the fo'c'sle, in charge of the gun: he had no sooner got there, clattering up the ladder in the darkness, and Leading-Seaman Phillips had reported that the gun's-crew was closed up, than he felt Compass Rose tremble as she increased speed: the wind of their advance struck cold on his face, prompting him to action.

From where he sat on a fish-box on the port- of the fo'c'sle, industriously sewing a button on to the old coat lying on the deck between his legs, Mallory could see six men, all dressed in the uniform of the regular German Navy--one crouched behind a belted Spandau mounted on its tripod just aft of the two-pounder, three others bunched amidships, each armed with an automatic machine carbine--Schmeissers, he thought--the captain, a hard, cold-faced young lieutenant with the Iron Cross on his tunic, looking out the open door of the wheelhouse and, finally, a curious head peering over the edge of the engine-room hatch.

In the harsh glare of the searchlights she seemed more forlorn, more abandoned than ever, so deep now by the head that the f or'ard well deck had vanished, and the fo'c'sle, like some lonely rock, now awash, now buried deep as the big seas rolled it under -- the wind had gone, the rain had gone, but the seas were almost as high as ever, and even more confused.

When the duty Petty Officer appeared in the wardroom doorway, cap in hand, to say that Compass Rose was 'ready for Rounds', Lockhart, who was Officer-of-the-Day, stood up, and followed him out of the wardroom and up the ladder towards the fo'c'sle, and the last job of his 24-hour turn of duty.

On deck the foretopmen had set the elm-tree pump a-wheezing, while the fo'c'slemen washed the fo'c'sle with the fresh sea-water they pumped, the maintopmen washed the starboard side of the quarter-deck and the quarter-deck men all the rest, grinding away with holystones until the water ran like thin milk from the admixture of minute raspings of wood and caulking, and the boys and the idlers - the people who merely worked all day - heaved at the chain-pumps to clear the night's water out of the bilges, and the gunner's crew cosseted the fourteen four-pounders.

Appalled by the havoc wrought on the fo'c'sle, the gunlayers of the remaining weapons that could be brought to bear certainly did make reply.

A French frigate within three cables (he could distinguish men on board her now, so she was less than 700 yards away) and getting ready to heave - to to send over a boat - and the only sign of life on the British ship's decks was the men lounging on the hammock nettings, two or three watching from the fo'c'sle, and a few men on the quarterdeck.

It was impossible to pick one's way from one end of the fo'c'sle to the other, as Lockhart did each night when he made the Rounds, without being shocked and appalled and saddened by this slum corner of the war: and yet somehow one could be heartened also, and cheered by an impression of patience and endurance, and made to feel proud.

Yards of washing going up from the flag-deck and matelots running, actually running-up to the fo'c'sle head.

What matter if they blew the stern off the ship -- her nine great oil tanks, still intact, and the fo'c'sle had enough reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat: awash, perhaps, but still afloat.