Dana is describing the untidiness of a whaler he boarded:
"She had a false deck, which was rough and oily, and cut up in every direction by the chimes of oil casks; her rigging was slack and turning white; no paint on the spars or blocks; clumsy seizings and straps without covers, and homeward-bound splices in every direction."

chime 2
n.
5ME chimb < OE cimb3 (only in compounds); akin to Du kim, Ger kimme, an edge & ? COMB16 the extended rim at each end of a cask or barrel

The PBS show, the history detectives is on in the background, (talking about Sears mail order houses--my house (just sold) had a Sears mail order garage).

The kitchen table from our first house(the family homestead)(the table is now in my daughters house) came from the Sears catalog, too. it was shipped by rail to NYC, and to the then town of Westchester, (now Westchester Square, in the bronx) buy barge, along with other stores my husbands family had purchaced. A barrel (of pickled herrings according to family lore) scarred the top of the table, with the rocking motion, before it got home. Now, the scar is one of the family stories.
Now i know the name of the part of the barrel!

Another corner of the table is gouged from the screws of the meat grinder, that used to be clamped onto the table.

Helen, very nice story about the kitchen table..I have a strong animistic streak and can get a tad too sentimental about things like *old kitchen tables!

then town of Westchester, (now Westchester Square, in the bronx)

This comment has rekindled memory...cross threading...
Wasn't *the Bronx originally, a part of Westchester county? And so maybe, when the region was spilt off from Westchester, to create another NYC burrough, the terminology stayed intact and remains *the Bronx to this day. What do you think?

Westchester Square (not a square at all,but a misshappen bit of land!) was a town, (now its a neighborhood/subway stop) that was the county seat of Westchester.

in the 1890's (1893 i think...) the City of NY, became the Greater City of NY, and incorporated, Brooklyn,(which was a seperate city, and some town) Queens(which had 3 small cities) Staten Island, and the Bronx (named for a neighborhood of souther westerchester county) into NY. Westchester county lost its county seat, which moved to White Plains.

Queens, extended past its current county line, and the eastern end of queens became Nassua county (the 2 or 3rd richest county (tax base) in NY state, something like 15th in the nation, and bankrupt-- they still outspent!)