Net Overboard 



what lighter colour. The starboard warp ran forward to a bollard 

 that someone had just painted, probably to disguise a crack in its 

 metal. (It was impossible that anything aboard could be ship- 

 shape.) The bollard diverted the warp through an angle of close 

 on two hundred and seventy degrees, and dispatched it straight 

 port to the forward gallows, up which it climbed and down which 

 it descended, through two revolving sheaves, one bracketed to 

 the deck and one strung from a pulley to the top of the triangular 

 gallows. To the end of this red wire an otter board was shackled, 

 a series of planks as long as a man all screwed and hammered 

 together by iron flanges and heels. The other warp had a longer 

 journey. It led out from the port side and ran parallel to the first 

 until it reached a port version of the mushroom-shaped bollard. 

 Round this it was hitched so that it doubled back and ran astern, 

 almost the whole length of the ship, to the after gallows where it 

 too was shackled to a board. Both of these trawl doors were, at 

 the moment, lying on their longer edges, wedged between a 

 gallows and a port rail. Between them, the net meandered. 



At least, Jan supposed it was the net. It hardly looked like a 

 hunter at the moment. It didn't even have the status of the 

 sleeping dunce he had begun to imagine. There was just a brown 

 heap of collapsed netting : tied at intervals to a pipe that ran along 

 the side of the ship, a long tubular heap, a soft pipe of sisal hitched 

 to the hard pipe of hot steel. At either end it was shackled to 

 the boards by the ropes that met in what must have been the ends 

 of the wings. Near midships Jan noticed a few of the double- 

 barred meshes of the cod-end, coarse and black beside the tender 

 browns of belly and batings. But, apart from such isolated frag- 

 ments of recognition, it was like a stranger to him. He was 

 anxious for it to resume its familiar shape. He wanted to meet 

 his somnambulist friend, the dunce. He hankered toward the 

 time when it would be unfurled and floated free into the sea, for 

 the moment when he could cry to himself: 'Net overboard.' 



'And a fine drunken lazy good-for-nothing you are, lying 

 snoring at home as dead as a bundle of bacon, while your 



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