Crossword-Solution: SPRITS 6 letters, 23 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

During the first and middle parts of these twenty-four hours the wind was from the east, blowing what the seamen term ‘fresh breezes’; but in the afternoon it shifted to E.N.E., accompanied with so heavy a swell of sea that the _Smeaton_ and tender struck their topmasts, launched in their bolt-sprits, and ‘made all snug’ for a gale.

And whilst they waited thus, under cover of the darkness and as the tide began to ebb, Captain Blood's fleet weighed anchor quietly; and, as once before, with no more canvas spread than that which their sprits could carry, so as to give them steering way--and even these having been painted black--the four vessels, without a light showing, groped their way by soundings to the channel which led to that narrow passage out to sea.

Hence the names of infants, who are especially exposed to the assaults of evil sprits, are never spoken; and often in haunted spots, such as the gloomy depths of the forest, the banks of a river, or beside a bubbling spring, men will abstain from calling each other by their names for a like reason.

Come, sever, fear no sprits! We’ll have a Buck presently; we have watched later then this for a Doe, mine Host.

Rollers, buoys, nets, kegs, swabs, fenders, blocks, buckets, kedges, corks, buckie-pots, oars, poppies, tillers, sprits, gaffs, and every kind of gear (more than Theocritus himself could tell) lay about, and rolled about, and upset their own masters, here and there and everywhere, upon this half acre of slip and stumble, at the top of the boat channel down to the sea, and in the faint rivalry of three vague lights, all making darkness visible.