What is "foretopman"

Usage examples of "foretopman".

Jack and Stephen went ashore, followed by Seymour and Reade, Bonden and a young foretopman called Fazackerley: they carried a compass, tools, a bottle, and a pot of paint, and as they walked up the damp sand to the tide-mark the sun rose behind them.

Delaney, Foretopman, Rated Able, and if we can stand the sight of each other in a few weeks, you can call me Liam.

Then the foretopmen had to slide down swiftly from aloft to haul on the halyards, and as soon as the yard was up, they had to hoist the jibs and staysails.

It was a tedious, job, but it meant a seaman who knew that his number was, for example, 16 could see from the bill that he was a foretopman in the larboard watch, and when going into action he was second captain of a particular gun, that under arms he would have a cutlass and a tomahawk, and for the rest of the evolutions the bill showed him precisely what he did on the foretopsail yard.

The petty officer glared at him threateningly and then bellowed in a voice more suited to addressing foretopmen, 'Cap'n Richard Bolitho!

The afterguard doubled up, falling into their place on the fourth side of the square formed by the forecastlemen, the foretopmen and maintopmen.

On to the foretopmen under Pullings, who greeted him as though they had never met before with a 'Present, properly dressed and clean, sir,' and fell in behind the captain and the first lieutenant.

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.

Now the orders flew: looking up from Ellis' wet body, Stephen saw Jack utter three bouts of technicalities to Dillon, who relayed them, elaborated, through his speaking-trumpet to the bosun and the foretopmen as they flew aloft.

Who does it prove to be but Foretopman Bodine, once of the Seahorse, who, as he now relates, having jump'd that ship in Madras, watching from shore as she sail'd away to the Capture of Manila, had then hir'd on to a China ship, which was set upon in mid-Ocean by Pirates, who took him to South America, whence he escap'd, making his way North, among Typhoons and Hurricanoes, Jungle and Swamp, Alligators and Boas, Indians and Spaniards, till fetching up in Perth Amboy in the company of a certain Roaring Dot, belle of the Harbor.

Abel Black, foretopman, starboard watch, a perfectly ordinary cracked fibula (had stumbled over a misplaced bucket in the dark) was on the point of bursting.