Rumbowline

Her stern was where her stem should be, her yards set abaft the masts, her square sails gybing out before the wind, so that the tackle and rigging, poles, transoms, and rumbowlines appeared to have been lifted together and reversed in their relation to the hull.

Frost shivered inside his sodden wrap of rumbowline canvas, judged the need to reef main courses, and calculated back to the onset of the squall, disbelieving that less than five minutes earlier the random surge of an unexpectedly long swell had lifted Salmon’s stern into the path of an enemy cannon ball.