Quote: “For winter or summer he rigged alike…”

“Poor old Cuddy! a better soul, nor braver heart in breeze or battle, never thumped ‘twixt the ribs of man! He was none o’ your nice-uns as never seed daylight till the decks were dried up, and reg’larly reported dry as a bone. Sea or harbour, wet or dry, gale or calm, the dawn always seed him on deck. There he’d pace the break o’ the poop, with his bluebreeks and white stockings (for winter or summer he rigged alike), his hard-weather hat shipped—for the scraper he bent in a breeze was always in use afore breakfast. It was as brown as a berry, and the lace round the rim as black as an old copper bolt. Well, there, with his three-cocked-scraper a-thawtships—for ’twas a reg’lar razee—ay, lower cut-down nor a Green’ich boson’s—well, there, in this sort o’ rig, he’d pace the poop, twirling his two thumbs afore him, for all the world like a straighthaired quaker, whilst the mizen-topmen washing decks of a morn, would sluish and slash the water about him, in every direction.

“Never mind me,” he’d say, as if he was no more,—no, no more nor a reg’lar galoot, “never mind me, my man,” (for he always spoke to a man like a man,) “if I gets in your way,” he’d say, in a voice and look as told the truth of his tongue—for half your chaps as say a kind word to a fellow, don’t say it so much from their nat’ral bent, as to try and earn a name, as they knows in their hearts they doesn’t desarve—”if  I gets in your way,” old Cuddy ‘ould say—”it’s my fault, my man, and not yours, my man.”

He’d the most takenest tongue I ever met in my day.—I’m blessed, if I woudn’t rather get a reg’lar blowin-up from he—nor—ay,—a good word from half your capring skippers.”

Quote from an unknown tale by “Captain Glasscock”, as reviewed in The Edinburgh review, Vol. 52, October 1830 to January 1831. In the same issue, the first book my Frederick Marryat was reviewed, and they didn’t like it – “we are sorry to be obliged to say, that it is marked by many violations of taste and propriety.”

Source