Explore "Master Rockafellar's Voyage" by W. Clark Russell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This was an incident to kill the tediousness of my first watch on deck very pleasantly. It was seeing life at sea too, tasting the excitement of it, and when eight bells sounded, and I went below, I began in good truth to feel myself something of a sailor.
But it was "watch and watch," with us on board that ship, as in all other ships of those days, though what the practice is now in this age of steamboats I will not undertake to say. By "watch and watch," I mean that one division of the crew went below for four hours, whilst the other division kept the deck. Those below then came up again for another four hours' duty, and so on till the dog watches came round, when each watch had two hours of duty only, the object of the change being to vary the time of the four hours' watches; so that, for example, if one division had to keep the middle watch, say on a Monday the dog watches contrived that that spell of duty would next night fall to the lot of the other division.