Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four
days now without a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days
without a fish, the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was definitely most unlucky,
and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first
week.
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always
went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that
was furled around the mast.
The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck.
Brown blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars
from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and
were cheerful and undefeated.
“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up.
“I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”
The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat.
Stay with them!”
When the writer says, “...it looked like the flag of permanent defeat”, he means the sail: