They're a measly lot, though." I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas.

Our four masts seemed to have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us, under Mr.Mellaire's direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one another.

The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these small sails led me to ask: "But what would you do, Mr.Pike, with a green crew like this, if you were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread ?" He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from both sides of a street.
"Do ?" Miss West answered for him.

"We'd get the sail off.

Oh, it can be done, Mr.Pathurst, with any kind of a crew.