was piled
on at once, and then what a sight the ship was to behold! Scudding
under bare poles was dramatic also.

The life on board ship in those times--its humor, its tedium, its
dangers, its hardships--was never before so vividly portrayed. The
tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that
little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had
a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on
this journey, it is incredible how he could have made it so complete,
so specific is the life of each day. The reader craves more light on
one point--the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In setting
out on the homeward journey they took aboard a dozen sheep, four
bullocks, a dozen or more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry,
thousands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder and feed for
the cattle and poultry and pigs. The vessel seemed elastic; they could
always find room for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. The
hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, and they invented
curious machinery to press in a hundred hides where one could not be
forced by hand. By this means the forty thousand hides were easily
disposed of as part of the home cargo.

The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. The Alert was so
loaded, her cargo so _steved_ in, that she was stiff as a man in a
strait-jacket. But the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her
work herself loose in a week or two, and then she'll walk up to Cape
Horn like a race-horse."

It is curious how the sailors can't work together without a song. "A
song is as necessary to a sailor as the drum and fife are to the
soldier. They can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it."
Some songs were much more effective than others. "Two or three songs
would be tried, one after the other, with no effect--not an inch could
be got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up seemed to hit the
humor of the moment and drove the tackles two blocks at once. 'Heave
round, hearty!' 'Captain gone ashore!' and the like, might do for
common pulls, but in an emergency, when we wanted a heavy,
raise-the-dead pull, which would start the beams of the ship, there
was nothing like 'Time for us to go!' 'Round the corner,' or 'Hurrah!
Hurrah! my hearty bullies!'"

* * * * *

The mind of the professional critic, like the professional logical
mind, becomes possessed of certain ru