Judge, 1910-09-03 · page 16 of 16
Judge — September 3, 1910 — page 16: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a tall-tale comic strip featuring an unnamed sea captain recounting an improbable adventure. The humor relies on increasingly absurd nautical escapades: captured by pirates, he escapes by improvising a tightrope using ship's rigging and a castle flagpole half a mile away. He outruns a pursuing pirate across the rope, then cuts it, sending the pirate to his death below. The satire targets the genre of exaggerated sailor stories—the "sea yarn"—where rough seamen boast of impossible feats. The captain's dialect ("'Twuz," "me lads," "swab me whiskers") and cavalier attitude toward murder exemplify the stereotype. For modern readers, this represents period humor mining comedic value from working-class braggadocio and implausible adventure narratives popular in late 19th/early 20th-century entertainment.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
JUDGE THE YARNS OF CAPTAIN 1, “"'Twuz in the Bay o° Biscay, me lads. I wuz captured by a suddent I breaks away from the pirate chief and makes a pirates and hustled aboard their ship, which wuz a-lyin’ off shon st, skionin’ up like a cat, with bim me, wavin’ ¢ fer ransom big knife, — 3 I reaches the cross:rees, where there wuz a coil of rope hangin’, and 4, —— The loop slips over the flagstaff and I draws it I quick makes a loop in the end and burls it toward a castle which wuz on the mast on thisend. I wuza pretty good tight-rope walker, so 1 makes a dash the shore half a mile away.—— across the rope. But swab me whiskers! that fellow wuz That wuz a grand sight, though, me and that pirate racin’ 6, — ~ But jist as he wuz about to git me 1 whips out me pocket knife and cross the rope, Well, I reaches the flagpole with him a-thunderin’ cuts the rope, dashin’ him on the rocks two hundred feet below. I tell you, at me heels boys, that wuz a narrer escape fer me !"” comichoo!