Quotation from: Elsinore

Written by: Jack London

"Oh, well," he muttered cryptically, "different customs on different
ships, as the cook said when he went for'ard to cast off the spanker
sheet."

Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time
to work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea.
Mulligan Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he
not been born crooked with a crooked back.