"Swabbing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bark called The Sieve, and when I'm aboard I'll close all the shutters, and lock up the parrot that sneezes and stutters, and wake all the skippers, and put on my slippers, and get into bed while the mates overhead are swabbing the decks and heaving the lead and baling the bilge-water up with their dippers; and when they have gotten the vessel to going, and settled all down to their knitting and sewing, and the twenty-third mate, who is always so late, has learned what is meant by a third and last warning, I'll turn ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... (11 a.m.) some half a dozen of the elder boys, attired in dirty white dungaree and barefooted, were engaged in swabbing out what, in her sea-going days, had been the Egeria's ward-room, making ready to set out tables for an afternoon tea to follow the ceremony. They were nominally under supervision of the ship's Schoolmaster, who, however, had gone off to unpack a hamper of flowers—the ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
