Nations differ in their customs, and likewise in their rigs. No Italian ship can sail the sea with a straight martingale, and no other ship would venture forth with one that was anything but true.
For weeks at a time, after our entry into the southern trades, it was hardly necessary to touch a brace except for the sweating up each night in the last dog watch, when a swig or two on the ropes would bring back any slack that had worked around the pins. The job of setting up standing rigging completed, we turned our attention to the running gear. We rove off new whips on all the braces, using an eye splice that was a favorite with the mate, being tucked after the manner of a sailmaker's splice, that is, the continuity of the strands of the rope was preserved, the appearance of the whips being very trim.
The tops'l downhauls were rove off with new rope, and the gear of all the lower stays'ls, lower tops'ls and courses was overhauled and replaced where needed.
As we began to lift the Southern Cross and the trades left us, we again shifted sail, an all day job that this time fell on a Sunday, and when completed found us under our best suit of canvas ready for that storm corner of the voyage, Cape Horn. We overhauled the rudder tackles, reeving new purchases "with the sun," as indeed all purchases are rove. Oil bags were made, shaped like beech nuts, bound with ratline stuff, and fitted with a stout becket. By filling these with heavy non-freezing animal or vegetable oil and puncturing them with a sail needle, they afforded the best means for spreading oil on the waters in time of storm.
One sail in particular that we bent at this time made a great impression on me; this was a heavy storm spencer made of dark hemp canvas, soft and pliable even when wet, unlike the stiff white American cotton stuff that rips out your finger nails when fighting the bellying folds, tough as sheet iron, as it slams out from a bucking yard. The main spencer was evidently an acquisition from some Asiatic or European voyage. It bent to an iron jackstay, and furled in to the mast with a set of brails, being cut "leg-o'-mutton," the sheet hauling aft to big eyebolts on either side of the waist.
Double lashings were passed on all of the lifeboat gripes. Rolling and jumper tackles were got ready for the lower and tops'l yards, to relieve the stress on yards and parrals, and straps and whips were prepared, and laid aside, for use as preventer braces should the necessity arise. In these preparations on the _Fuller_ we had a foresight of what to expect when off the dreaded Cape; at the same time we were certain that no vessel was ever better or more intelligently groomed for heavy weather.