Crossword-Solution: TOPSAILS 8 letters, 7 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

The slavers were generally small, handy craft; fast, of course; usually schooner-rigged, and carrying flying topsails and forecourse.

Towards evening the breeze freshened up, and the first mate ordered reefs to be taken in the topsails and top-gallant sails in expectation of a windy night.

The name of the boat on which he found himself was the “Bertha Millner.” She was a two-topmast, 28-ton keel schooner, 40 feet long, carrying a large spread of sail--mainsail, foresail, jib, flying-jib, two gaff-topsails, and a staysail.

Scarcely ever a sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care to think about the sea, where life is all into the fo’cs’le and out again, where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where after forty-five years of reefing topsails you can’t well remember off which ship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who in the fo’cs’le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly, the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosene lamp.

Whitman spares us all allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy’s topsails off the Spanish Main.