Sailors wait around while lines of drying clothes are pulled down from the sheets on board, presumably on board the 'Formidable.'
There may be, as the title states, some mechanical means of pulling down the lines so the crew can get their hands on their clean underwear; if so, it wasn't in evidence. It might as well be a matter of simply untying one end. It may seem to the modern audience to be a strange film for the era, but many of the actualities of this period covered similar, workaday situations, in which carts might be seen trundling down the street, or people walking around downtown, or even a still scene, like the Statue of Liberty. For many of the contemporary audiences, these were exotic scenes. the audience might never seen a battleship, or the downtown of a great metropolis, or the Statue of Liberty. For the modern viewer, these short films are often the only records we have of a vanished world.