What is "grapplings"

Usage examples of "grapplings".

There being too much wind for towing the praams in the usual way, they were warped to the rock in the most laborious manner by their windlasses, with successive grapplings and hawsers laid out for this purpose.

I suspected she was see­ing Catalina often in the city during the day, and I was right, though in my naive Western materialist way I imagined they were merely having a love-affair, meeting in hotel rooms for interludes of slippery grapplings and tonguings, when in fact it was Sundara's soul far more than her body that had been seduced.