Three people hung along the length of a slender skysail yard.

It hung over the port side, the main skysail ballooning in the water.

Only the skysail yards were taken down to reduce loading on the masts.

"First-time offense, four hours at the skysail top.

"There's only one thing, lads," Skysail Jack finally said.

And the guards led me on, and that was the last I saw of Skysail Jack.

And Skysail Jack and I peered and knew each other under the wreckage.

A skysail is the uppermost sail in many old square-rigged sail-plans (though sometimes topped by a moonsail).

If that skysail should bring the Cornélie up a trifle, and if her shot should come aboard, you may draw away.'

He had picked up some of the names, but he had no idea which sail the mizzen skysail was, nor the fore topgallant.

After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack.

She held my hand to her lips and kissed it, biting a knuckle gently, and ran aft to trim the maintree skysail with other A.B.s.

But, almost immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.

I could see little, for I was blinking in the sunshine like a bat, after five years of darkness; yet I saw enough of Skysail Jack to pain my heart.

Having ordered the perilous expedient of a skysail on the main - perilous, because the Ariel's royal-mast had been sprung when the sail blew out - he turned the question over in his mind.

A moonraker, also known as a moonsail, hope-in-heaven, or hopesail, is a square sail flown immediately above a skysail (see sail-plan) on the royal masts of a square rigged sailing ship.

She did carry away a skysail, and at one point a large unidentified object tore from her bottom, but the leagues raced away in her wake, and Jack, perpetually on the quarterdeck, could almost have loved her.

Just a few degrees east of the main skysail yard shone one very bright bluish point surrounded by smaller points just outside its concentrated light: Pacifica, a gas giant with many moons that seemed to move as the minutes passed.

All three masts (with lower, top, and topgallant masts including royal and skysail masts) had a course sail, a topsail, a topgallant sail, a royal sail, and a skysail.

The only sound that reached Jack in his holy area of deck by the starboard rail was the conversation between Dr Maturin and Jagiello: the significance of the skysail escaped them entirely, and they talked away with the freedom of perfect ignorance.

From bottom to top, the sails of each mast are named by the mast and position on the mast, e.g. for the mainmast, from lowest to highest: main course, main topsail, main topgallant ("t'gallant"), main royal, main skysail, and main moonraker.

The little quarterdeck was crowded, all the officers and young gentlemen having been there with scarcely a break since the beginning of the chase, but if they spoke at all it was in low voices: now they were all silent, waiting for what would happen when the skysail was sheeted home.

The sky was a different blue, deep and vigorous, and the clouds stood on the firmament in towering ranges the colors of lead and silver, their bottoms cut cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships, mainsail and topsail, royal and skysail piled up into the heavens.