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 [1] 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 nowadays the only thing that flies in an American ship is a belaying-pin.  You don’t know; you haven’t a guess.  How would you like to go on deck for your middle watch, fourteen months on end, with all your duty to do and every one’s life depending on you, and expect to get a knife ripped into you as you come out of your stateroom, or be sand-bagged as you pass the boat, or get tripped into the hold, if the hatches are off in fine weather?  That kind of shakes the starch out of the brotherly love and New Jerusalem business.  You go through the mill, and you’ll have a bigger grudge against every old shellback that dirties his plate in the three oceans, than the Bank of California could settle up.  No; it has an ugly look to it, but the only way to run a ship is to make yourself a terror.”

[1] In sea-lingo (Pacific) DUTCHMAN includes all Teutons and folk from the basin of the Baltic; SCATTERMOUCH, all Latins and Levantines.