hich go to make the sailor's lot at least tolerable
nowadays, were at that time unknown. A smoky lamp swung on gimbals
half-lighted the forecastle--an apartment which, in a craft of scant 400
tons, did not afford commodious quarters for a crew of perhaps a score,
with their sea chests and bags. The condition of the fetid hole at the
beginning of the voyage, with four or five apprentices or green hands
deathly sick, the hardened seamen puffing out clouds of tobacco smoke, and
perhaps all redolent of rum, was enough to disenchant the most ardent
lover of the sea. The food, bad enough in all ages of seafaring, was, in
the early days of our merchant marine, too often barely fit to keep life
in men's bodies. The unceasing round of salt pork, stale beef, "duff,"
"lobscouse," doubtful coffee sweetened with molasses, and water, stale,
lukewarm, and tasting vilely of the hogshead in which it had been stored,
required sturdy appetites to make it even tolerable. Even in later days
Frank T. Bullen was able to write: "I have often seen the men break up a
couple of biscuits into a pot of coffee for their breakfast, and after
letting it stand a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin
from the top--maggots, weevils, etc--to the extent of a couple of
tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the mess into their craving
stomachs."

It may be justly doubted whether history has ever known a race of men so
hardy, so self-reliant, so adaptable to the most complex situations, so
determined to compel success, and so resigned in the presence of
inevitable failure, as the early American sea captains. Their lives were
spent in a ceaseless conflict with the forces of nature and of men. They
had to deal with a mutinous crew one day and with a typhoon the next. If
by skillful seamanship a piratical schooner was avoided in the reaches of
the Spanish Main, the resources of diplomacy would be taxed the next day
to persuade some English or French colonial governor not to seize the
cargo that had escaped the pirates. The captain must be a seaman, a
sea-soldier, a sea-lawyer, and a sea-merchant, shut off from his
principals by space which no electric current then annihilated. He must
study markets, sell his cargo at the most profitable point, buy what his
prophetic vision suggested would sell profitably, and sell half a dozen
intermediate cargoes before returning, and even dispose of the vessel
herself, if gain would result. His experience wa