plenty of it, shrewd, strong, common sense, and more real gentlemanly feeling than we on shore generally suppose, a good deal of faith, and certain standing principles of sea-morality.  But at the same time he has prejudices and whims utterly unaccountable to men living on shore.  He will forfeit one or two hundred dollars of wages to run from a ship and captain with which he can find no fault.  He will ship the next day in a worse craft for smaller wages.  You cannot understand his impulses and moods and grievances till you see them from a forecastle point of view.

It may be that Science will solve the riddle by casting aside the works and improvements of a thousand years,—­the “wave line,” the spar, the sail, and all,—­and with them the men of the sea.  It may be that “Leviathans” will march unheedingly through the mountain waves,—­that steam and the Winans’s model will obliterate old inventions and labors and triumphs.  Blake and Raleigh and Frobisher and Dampier may be known no more.  The poetry and the mystery of the sea may perish altogether, as they have in part.  Out of the past looks a bronzed and manly face; along the deck of a phantom-ship swings a square and well-knit form.  I hear, in memory, the ring of his cheerful voice.  I see his alert and prompt obedience, his self-respecting carriage, and I know him for the man of the sea, who was with Hull in the “Constitution” and Porter in the “Essex.”  I look for him now upon the broad decks of the magnificent merchantmen that lie along the slips of New York, and in his place is a lame and stunted, bloated and diseased wretch, spiritless, hopeless, reckless.  Has he knowledge of a seaman’s duty?  The dull sodden brain can carry the customary orders of a ship’s duty, but more than that it cannot.  Has he hopes of advancement?  His horizon is bounded by the bar and the brothel.  A dog’s life, a dog’s berth, and a dog’s death are his heritage.

The old illusion still prevails and has power over little towheaded Joseph on the Berkshire interval.  It will not prevail much longer.  It is fast yielding to the power of facts.  The Joes of next year may run from home in obedience to the planetary destiny which casts their horoscope in Neptune, but they will not run to the forecastle.  We shall have officers and men of a different class,—­the Spartan on the quarter-deck, the Helot in the forecastle.  We have it now.  A story of brutal wrong on shipboard startles the public.  A mutiny breaks out in the Mersey, and a mate is beaten to death, and we wonder why the service is so demoralized.  The story could be told by a glance at the names upon the shipping-papers.  The officers are American,—­the men are foreigners, blacks, Irish, Germans, non-descripts, but hopelessly severed from the chances of the quarter-deck.  The law may interpose a strong arm, and keep the officer from violence, the men from mutiny.  We may enact a Draconian code which shall maintain a sullen and revengeful order upon the seas, but all fellowship