rson was
a butcher--if it be safe or lawful to use such a phrase as "tradition"
in connection with one of the mariner's solemn planks of faith. He left
a large fortune behind, which has been a curse to his descendants, and
it would have been a great disappointment to the contemporary seamen if
it hadn't, as much of their time was used in the imprecation of ghastly
forms of punishment and in imagining modes of disposing of what they
vehemently avowed was ill-gotten wealth.

In my youthful days I listened to these tales and drank them in with
juvenile credulity. How often have boys remained on deck during their
watch below to get a glimpse of these personalities, and sometimes I
imagined I could see all that others had told me they had seen.
Incidents of this kind varied the monotony of a long passage, as the
talk about it went on until some other thing equally sensational
developed. To make any attempt at ridiculing the reality of such things
was to offer a gross insult to the seamen's susceptibilities.

To say that shipowning, even in the early part or middle of the last
century, was synonymous with a system of heartless starvation would be
too sweeping an assertion to make. There always have been men who
strove to act generously towards the people serving in their vessels,
though these, I am persuaded, were in the minority, and it is to the
credit of that minority that they had to struggle against precedent,
example, and it may be the habitual conviction that it was part of the
sailor's business to take whatever food was put aboard for him. Running
short of provisions was to them only an incident natural to the
sailor's calling. This view had been handed down by successive
generations of avaricious stoats, not the least prominent and
contemptible of whom was Elizabeth, with her chilly heart, at one time
receiving from Drake the spoils of his voyage in the _Pelican_; at
another walking through the parks publicly with him, and listening with
eager fascination to his stories of "amazing adventure," adventures
that some of her Catholic subjects maintained to be "shocking piracy."
We all remember the story of his sailing off with bullion from Tarapaca
worth half a million ducats; also of the chase and capture of the
_Cacafuego_, which had aboard the whole of the produce of the Lima
mines for the season, consisting of silver, gold, emeralds and rubies.
The hanging of Mr Doughty Philips, the spy, was talked of; the cutting