Chapter 22

WASH-DAY AND HOUSE-CLEANING IN A MAN-OF-WAR.

Besides the other tribulations connected with your hammock, you
must keep it snow-white and clean; who has not observed the long
rows of spotless hammocks exposed in a frigate's nettings, where,
through the day, their outsides, at least, are kept airing?

Hence it comes that there are regular mornings appointed for the
scrubbing of hammocks; and such mornings are called _scrub-
hammock-mornings;_ and desperate is the scrubbing that ensues.

Before daylight the operation begins. All hands are called, and
at it they go. Every deck is spread with hammocks, fore and aft;
and lucky are you if you can get sufficient superfices to spread
your own hammock in. Down on their knees are five hundred men,
scrubbing away with brushes and brooms; jostling, and crowding,
and quarrelling about using each other's suds; when all their
Purser's soap goes to create one indiscriminate yeast.

Sometimes you discover that, in the dark, you have been all the
while scrubbing your next neighbour's hammock instead of your own.
But it is too late to begin over again; for now the word is passed
for every man to advance with his hammock, that it may he tied to
a net-like frame-work of clothes-lines, and hoisted aloft to dry.

That done, without delay you get together your frocks and trowsers,
and on the already flooded deck embark in the laundry business.
You have no special bucket or basin to yourself--the ship being one
vast wash-tub, where all hands wash and rinse out, and rinse out and
wash, till at last the word is passed again, to make fast your clothes,
that they, also, may be elevated to dry.

Then on all three decks the operation of holy-stoning begins, so
called from the queer name bestowed upon the principal instruments
employed. These are ponderous flat stones with long ropes at each end,
by which the stones are slidden about, to and fro, over the wet and
sanded decks; a most wearisome, dog-like, galley-slave employment.
For the byways and corners about the masts and guns, smaller stones
are used, called _prayer-books;_ inasmuch as the devout operator has
to down with them on his knees.

Finally, a grand flooding takes place, and the decks are remorselessly
thrashed with dry swabs. After which an extraordinary implement--a sort
of leathern hoe called a"_squilgee_"--is used to scrape and squeeze the
last dribblings of water from the planks. Concerning this "squilgee," I
think something of drawing up a memoir, and reading it before the
Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a most curious affair.

By the time all these operations are concluded it is _eight bell's_,
and all hands are piped to breakfast upon the damp and every-way