foretopman

The beautiful Billy Budd is a foretopman, ready to climb up the rigging.

Melville in Love Hardwick, Elizabeth 2000

"Aye, aye, bo, right you were," answered the brawny foretopman as he knocked in the head of another hogshead.

The Penang Pirate and, The Lost Pinnace

Such a cynosure, at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd, or Baby Budd, as more familiarly under circumstances hereafter to be given he at last came to be called, aged twenty-one, a foretopman of the British fleet toward the close of the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Billy Budd 1924

Though our new-made foretopman was well received in the top and on the gun decks, hardly here was he that cynosure he had previously been among those minor ship's companies of the merchant marine, with which companies only had he hitherto consorted.

Billy Budd 1924

But they were not so young as our foretopman, and no few of them must have known a hearth of some sort; others may have had wives and children left, too probably, in uncertain circumstances, and hardly any but must have had acknowledged kith and kin, while for Billy, as will shortly be seen, his entire family was practically invested in himself.

Billy Budd 1924

At the time, on the gun decks of the Indomitable, the general estimate of his nature and its unconscious simplicity eventually found rude utterance from another foretopman, one of his own watch, gifted, as some sailors are, with an artless poetic temperament; the tarry hands made some lines which after circulating among the shipboard crew for a while, finally got rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad.

Billy Budd 1924

Alongside of three other slumberers from below, he lay near that end of the booms which approaches the fore-mast; his station aloft on duty as a foretopman being just over the deckstation of the forecastlemen, entitling him according to usage to make himself more or less at home in that neighbourhood.

Billy Budd 1924

"You'd have made a right good foretopman if your heart is as stout as your fingers are quick," said he.

Rodney stone Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 1896

Came down the rope like a foretopman, hung all over with jewels: brooches, chains, and owches, you know, -- Scripture, -- kind of rope-walking Tiffany.

Fernley House Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards 1896

"You'd have made a right good foretopman if your heart is as stout as your fingers are quick," said he.

Rodney Stone Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 1896