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Slowly , with stiff ropes and iced rigging , we swung the yards round , everything coming hard , and with a creaking and rending sound , like pulling up a plank which had been frozen into the ice . In this little , wet , leaky hole , we were all quartered , in an atmosphere so bad that our lamp , which swung in the middle from the beams , sometimes actually burned blue , with a large circle of foul air about it . Having no money , and all his clothes and other things being in the chest , on board , and being a stranger , he became tired and hungry , and ventured down toward the shipping , to see if the vessel had sailed . All our standing rigging , fore and aft , was set up and tarred ; the masts stayed ; the lower and top-mast rigging rattled down , ( or up , as the fashion now is ;) and so careful were our officers to keep the rattlins taught and straight , that we were obliged to go aloft upon the ropes and shearpoles with which the rigging was swifted in ; and these were used as jury rattlins until we got close upon the coast . " was the answer to everything ; and we should not have minded this , were it not for the thought that we should be off Cape Horn in the very dead of winter . He is bound in gallantry to find out the lady and return the compliment , though it must not be done if the person sees you . The California had got under weigh at the same moment ; and we sailed down the narrow bay abreast and were just off the mouth , and finding ourselves gradually shooting ahead of her , were on the point of giving her three parting cheers , when , suddenly , we found ourselves stopped short , and the California ranging fast ahead of us . The old sails were sent down , and three new topsails , and new fore and main courses , jib , and fore-topmast staysail , which were made on the coast , and never had been used , were bent , with a complete set of new earings , robands and reef-points ; and reef-tackles were rove to the courses , and spilling-lines to the top-sails . All the Kanakas attributed his escape solely to my knowledge , and would not be persuaded that I had not all the secrets of the physical system open to me and under my control . Being so deep and heavy , she wanted the buoyancy which should have carried her over the seas , and she dropped heavily into them , the water washing over the decks ; and every now and then , when an unusually large sea met her fairly upon the bows , she struck it with a sound as dead and heavy as that with which a sledge-hammer falls upon the pile , and took the whole of it in upon the forecastle , and rising , carried it aft in the scuppers , washing the rigging off the pins , and carrying along with it everything which was loose on deck . So quiet , too , was the sea , and so steady the breeze , that if these sails had been sculptured marble , they could not have been more motionless . Sandwich Islanders ; but it was far from being the usual noisy , laughing time . One of our boys , when off Cape Horn , reefing topsails of a dark night , and when there were no boats to be lowered away , and where , if a man fell overboard he must be left behind , - lost his hold of the reef-point , slipped from the foot-rope , and would have been in the water in a moment , when the man who was next to him on the yard caught him by the collar of his jacket , and hauled him up upon the yard , with - " Hold on , another time , you young monkey , and be d - - d to you ! Even the never-failing resource of long yarns , which eke out many a watch , seemed to have failed us now ; for we had been so long together that we had heard each other 's stories told over and over again , till we had them by heart ; each one knew the whole history of each of the others , and we were fairly and literally talked out . The mate was about to call all hands , when the captain stopped him , and said that the men would be beaten out if they were called up so often ; that as our watch must stay on deck , it might as well be doing that as anything else . The Diana went out of the bay in company with us , but parted from us off Point Pinos , being bound to the Sandwich Islands . Here he went dead to leeward among the pulperias , gambling rooms , etc ., and came down to San Pedro , to be moral by being out of temptation . At night , after we had knocked off , and were sitting round in the forecastle , smoking and talking and taking sailor 's pleasure , we congratulated ourselves upon being in that situation in which we had wished ourselves every time we had come into San Diego . During the two days I had been below , the weather was much the same that it had been , head winds , and snow and rain ; or , if the wind came fair , too foggy , and the ice too thick , to run . All hands were busy looking at it , - the captain and mates from the quarter-deck , the cook from his galley , and the sailors from the forecastle ; and even Mr. N ., the passenger , who had kept in his shell for nearly a month , and hardly been seen by anybody , and who we had almost forgotten was on board , came out like a butterfly , and was hopping round as bright as a bird . They were all watching it carefully , for sailors have a notion that if the corposant rises in the rigging , it is a sign of fair weather , but if it comes lower down , there will be a storm .