Crossword-Solution: BOSUN 5 letters, 63 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

The other half’s Jap or Malay.” One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought he had been recently injured.

And he was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship _Elsinore_—rated one of the finest sailing-ships afloat! Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like.

Then he shouted to the fo'castle head, where a bosun's mate and his crew had climbed and were awaiting orders in evident and most unreasonable unconcern.

The Old Man didn't need a third mate any more than he needed a tail, but Matt Peasley looked like a comer to him and he wanted an excuse to encourage the boy by berthing him aft; also it sounds far better to be known as a third mate instead of a mate's bosun, which was, in reality, the position the Old Man had promised Matt.

After abandoning his plan to ship as chief mate he had sought a second mate's berth, but failing to find one, and with each idle day making deeper inroads into his scant savings, he had at length descended to the ignominy of considering a job as bosun.