Clew up the heads

‘…here have I been keeping you in talk over these matters, when your most urgent desire has surely been for a moment privacy in which you might deliver up thanks to a merciful Heavenly Father for your delivery from all the dangers and tribulations you have undergone. Your pardon, sir.’
   My urgent need was in fact for an enormous brandy and a square meal, but I answered him with my wistful smile… ‘Indeed,’ says I, looking sadly reflective, ‘there is hardly a moment in these past few months that I have not spent in prayer.’
   He gripped my hand again, looking moist, and then, thank God, he remembered at last that I had a belly, and gave orders for food and a glass of spirits while he went off, excusing himself, to splice the binnacle or clew up the heads, I shouldn’t wonder.

Flash For Freedom!, p.120, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.

Subtle naval tactics

Now, in my experience there is only one way to fight a ship, and that is to get below, on the side opposite to the enemy and find a snug spot behind a stout bulkhead.

Flash For Freedom!, p.110, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.

The coarse art of sailing

…the idyll was marred by the appearance round the southern headland of a small, waspish-looking vessel, standing slowly out on a course parallel to our own. It happened that I saw her first, and drew my commander’s attention to her with a sailor-like hail of: ‘Jesus! Look at that!’

Flash For Freedom!, p.91, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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A floating cathedral

Nowadays you have no notion of what a sailing ship was like in the forties; people who travel P.O.S.H in a steam packet can’t imagine, for one thing, the hellish continual din of a wooden vessel – the incessant creaking and groaning of timber and cordage, like a fiend’s orchestra playing the same discordant notes, regular as clockwork, each time she rolled. And, by God, they rolled, far worse than iron boats, bucketing up and down, and stinking, too, with the musty stale smell of a floating cathedral, and the bilges plashing like a giant’s innards.

Flash For Freedom!, p.49, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Sea-green and corruptible

…I wasn’t cut out for life on the ocean wave. I can’t deny it;  if Captain Marryat had had to write about me he’d have burned his pen, signed on a Cardiff tramp, and been buried at sea. For one thing, in my first few days aboard I did not thrash the ship’s bully, make friends with the nigger* cook, or learn how to gammon a bow sprit from a leathery old salt who called me a likely lad. No, I spent those days in my bunk, feeling damned ill, and only crawling on deck occasionally to take the air and quickly scurry below to my berth. I was sea-green and corruptible Flashy in those days.

Flash For Freedom!, p.47, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

*Flashman's use of racial epitahs is a continuing problem for more enlightened, contemporary readers. The inclusion of these passages should not be taken as tacit support for his misanthropic, 19th century view of race relations.

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The vain regrets of youth

…if I’d been like Jack Merry or Dick Champion, or any of the other plucky little prigs that Tom Brown and his cronies used to read about, setting off to seek my fortune on the bounding wave, I’d have brushed aside a manly tear and faced the future with the stout heart of youth, while old Bosun McHearty clapped me on the shoulder and held me enthralled with tales of the South Seas, and I would have gone to bed at last thinking of my mother and resolving to prove worthy of my resolute and Christian commander, Captain Freeman. (God knows how many young idiots had gone to sea after being fed that kind of lying pap in their nursery books.)
    Perhaps at twenty-six I was too old and hard-used, for instead of a manly tear I did another manly vomit, and in place of Bosun McHearty there came a rush of seaman tailing on a rope across the deck, hurling me aside with a cry of ‘Stand from under, you bloody farmer!’, while from the dark above me my Christian commander bellowed at me to get below and not hinder work. So I went, and fell asleep thinking not of my mother, or of the credit I’d bring my family, but of the chance I’d missed in not rogering Fanny Locke that afternoon at Roundway Down. Aye, the vain regrets of youth.

Flash For Freedom!, p.47, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashy the sailor

I’m an experienced sailor, which is to say I’ve heaved my guts over the rail into all the Seven Seas, and before we were ten minutes out I was sprawled in the scuppers…

Flash For Freedom!, p.45, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Wanting in the head

It was obvious to me that I had fallen in with a lunatic, and possibly a dangerous one, but since in my experience seaman are wanting in the head I wasn’t over-concerned.

Flash For Freedom!, pp.44-45, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,seaman.