Treasure Island vocabulary

Alongside lay one of the gigs, Silver in the stern-sheets— him I could always recognize— while a couple of men were leaning over the stern bulwarks, one of them with a red cap— the very rogue that I had seen some hours before stride-legs upon the palisade.

Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island (1883)

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"The main thing with people of that sort," said Holmes, as we sat in the sheets of the wherry, "is never to let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you. If you do, they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want."

Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of the Four

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What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, Mr. Wyatt stood up in the stern-sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box!

Edgar Allan Poe. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 4: The Oblong Box (1844)

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Allnutt came back into the sternsheets.

Cecil Scott Forester. The African Queen, p.11 (1935)