goods of their own in the ship, or to share the owner’s adventure.  In the whaling and fishery business we shall see that an almost pure communism prevailed.  These conditions attracted to the maritime calling men of an enterprising and ambitious nature—­men to whom the conditions to-day of mere wage servitude, fixed routes, and constant dependence upon the cabled or telegraphed orders of the owner would be intolerable.  Profits were heavy, and the men who earned them were afforded opportunities to share them.  Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle.  Often they became full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier, for boys went to sea at ages when the youngsters of equally prosperous families in these days would scarcely have passed from the care of a nurse to that of a tutor.  Thomas T. Forbes, for example, shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen; was commander of the “Levant” at twenty; and was lost in the Canton River before he was thirty.  He was of a family great in the history of New England shipping for a hundred years.  Nathaniel Silsbee, afterwards United States Senator from Massachusetts, was master of a ship in the East India trade before he was twenty-one; while John P. Cushing at the age of sixteen was the sole—­and highly successful—­representative in China of a large Boston house.  William Sturges, afterwards the head of a great world-wide trading house, shipped at seventeen, was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen, and at twenty-nine left the quarter-deck with a competence to establish his firm, which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China.  A score of such successes might be recounted.

But the fee which these Yankee boys paid for introduction into their calling was a heavy one.  Dana’s description of life in the forecastle, written in 1840, holds good for the conditions prevailing for forty years before and forty after he penned it.  The greeting which his captain gave to the crew of the brig “Pilgrim” was repeated, with little variation, on a thousand quarter-decks: 

“Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage.  If we get along well together we shall have a comfortable time; if we don’t, we shall hay hell afloat.  All you have to do is to obey your orders and do your duty like men—­then you will fare well enough; if you don’t, you will fare hard enough, I can tell you.  If we pull together you will find me a clever fellow; if we don’t, you will find me a bloody rascal.  That’s all I’ve got to say.  Go below the larboard watch.”