on; the old lady's money had fallen in
during the voyage of the Gleaner, and he was now, as soon as the smoke
of that engagement cleared away, secure of his ship. I suppose he was
about thirty: a powerful, active man, with a blue eye, a thick head
of hair, about the colour of oakum and growing low over the brow;
clean-shaved and lean about the jaw; a good singer; a good performer on
that sea-instrument, the accordion; a quick observer, a close reasoner;
when he pleased, of a really elegant address; and when he chose, the
greatest brute upon the seas.

His usage of the men, his hazing, his bullying, his perpetual
fault-finding for no cause, his perpetual and brutal sarcasm, might have
raised a mutiny in a slave galley. Suppose the steersman's eye to have
wandered: "You ----, ----, little, mutton-faced Dutchman," Nares would
bawl; "you want a booting to keep you on your course! I know a little
city-front slush when I see one. Just you glue your eye to that compass,
or I'll show you round the vessel at the butt-end of my boot." Or
suppose a hand to linger aft, whither he had perhaps been summoned not
a minute before. "Mr. Daniells, will you oblige me by stepping clear
of that main-sheet?" the captain might begin, with truculent courtesy.
"Thank you. And perhaps you'll be so kind as to tell me what the hell
you're doing on my quarter-deck? I want no dirt of your sort here. Is
there nothing for you to do? Where's the mate? Don't you set ME to find
work for you, or I'll find you some that will keep you on your back a
fortnight." Such allocutions, conceived with a perfect knowledge of his
audience, so that every insult carried home, were delivered with a mien
so menacing, and an eye so fiercely cruel, that his unhappy subordinates
shrank and quailed. Too often violence followed; too often I have heard
and seen and boiled at the cowardly aggression; and the victim, his
hands bound by law, has risen again from deck and crawled forward
stupefied--I know not what passion of revenge in his wronged heart.

It seems strange I should have grown to like this tyrant. It may even
seem strange that I should have stood by and suffered his excesses to
proceed. But I was not quite such a chicken as to interfere in public;
for I would rather have a man or two mishandled than one half of
us butchered in a mutiny and the rest suffer on the gallows. And in
private, I was unceasing in my protests.

"Captain," I once said to him, appealing to hi