Thus prepared to regard each other with no very cordial eye, it is not to be wondered at that the parties soon came into collision.  On the very first night Captain Thorn began his man-of-war discipline by ordering the lights in the cabin to be extinguished at eight o’clock.

The pride of the partners was immediately in arms.  This was an invasion of their rights and dignities not to be borne.  They were on board of their own ship, and entitled to consult their ease and enjoyment.  M’Dougal was the champion of their cause.  He was an active, irritable, fuming, vainglorious little man, and elevated in his own opinion, by being the proxy of Mr. Astor.  A violent altercation ensued, in the course of which Thorn threatened to put the partners in irons should they prove refractory; upon which M’Dougal seized a pistol and swore to be the death of the captain should he ever offer such an indignity.  It was some time before the irritated parties could be pacified by the more temperate bystanders.

Such was the captain’s outset with the partners.  Nor did the clerks stand much higher in his good graces; indeed, he seems to have regarded all the landsmen on board his ship as a kind of live lumber, continually in the way.  The poor voyageurs, too, continually irritated his spleen by their “lubberly” and unseemly habits, so abhorrent to one accustomed to the cleanliness of a man-of-war.  These poor fresh-water sailors, so vainglorious on shore, and almost amphibious when on lakes and rivers, lost all heart and stomach the moment they were at sea.  For days they suffered the doleful rigors and retchings of sea-sickness, lurking below in their berths in squalid state, or emerging now and then like spectres from the hatchways, in capotes and blankets, with dirty nightcaps, grizzly beard, lantern visage and unhappy eye, shivering about the deck, and ever and anon crawling to the sides of the vessel, and offering up their tributes to the windward, to infinite annoyance of the captain.

His letters to Mr. Astor, wherein he pours forth the bitterness of his soul, and his seamanlike impatience of what he considers the “lubberly” character and conduct of those around him, are before us, and are amusingly characteristic.  The honest captain is full of vexation on his own account, and solicitude on account of Mr. Astor, whose property he considers at the mercy of a most heterogeneous and wasteful crew.

As to the clerks, he pronounced them mere pretenders, not one of whom had ever been among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he emphatically sets down for “as foolish a pedant as ever lived.”

Then as to the artisans and laborers who had been brought from Canada and shipped at such expense, the three most respectable, according to the captain’s account, were culprits, who had fled from Canada on account of their misdeeds; the rest had figured in Montreal as draymen, barbers, waiters, and carriole drivers, and were the most helpless, worthless beings “that ever broke sea-biscuit.”