sage 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 his patriotism, which was of
a hardy quality, "this is no way to treat American seamen. You don't
call it American to treat men like dogs?"

"Americans?" he said grimly. "Do you call these Dutchmen and
Scattermouches[4] Americans? I've been fourteen years to sea, all but
one trip under American colours, and I've never laid eye on an American
foremast hand. There used to be such things in the old days, when
thirty-five dollars were the wages out of Boston; and then you could
see ships handled and run the way they want to be. But that's all past
and gone, and