going as a rule in schooners owned or commanded by relatives.  It was no easy life that the youngster entered upon when first he attained the dignity of being a “cut-tail,” but such as it was, it was the life he had looked forward to ever since he was old enough to consider the future.  He lived in a little forecastle, heated by a stuffy stove, which it was his business to keep supplied with fuel.  The bunks on either side held rough men, not over nice of language or of act, smoking and playing cards through most of their hours of leisure.  From time immemorial it has been a maxim of the forecastle that the way to educate a boy is to “harden” him, and the hardening process has usually taken the form of persistent brutality of usage—­the rope’s end, the heavy hand, the hard-flung boot followed swift upon transgression of the laws or customs of ship or forecastle.  The “cut-tail” was everybody’s drudge, yet gloried in it, and a boy of Gloucester or Marblehead, who had lived his twelve years without at least one voyage to his credit, was in as sorry a state among his fellow urchins as a “Little Lord Fauntleroy” would be in the company of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

The intimacies of the village streets were continued on the ocean.  Fish supplanted marbles as objects of prime importance in the urchin’s mind.  The smallest fishing village would have two or three boats out on the banks, and the larger town several hundred.  Between the crews of these vessels existed always the keenest rivalry, which had abundant opportunity for its exhibition, since the conditions of the fishery were such that the schooners cruised for weeks, perhaps, in fleets of several hundred.  Every maneuver was made under the eyes of the whole fleet, and each captain and sailor felt that among the critics were probably some of his near neighbors at home.  Charles Nordhoff, who followed a youth spent at sea with a long life of honorable and brilliant activity in journalism, describes the watchfulness of the fleet as he had often seen it: 

“The fleet is the aggregate of all the vessels engaged in the mackerel fishery.  Experience has taught fishermen that the surest way to find mackerel is to cruise in one vast body, whose line of search will then extend over an area of many miles.  When, as sometimes happens, a single vessel falls in with a large ‘school,’ the catch is, of course, much greater.  But vessels cruising separately or in small squads are much less likely to fall in with fish than is the large fleet.  ‘The fleet’ is therefore the aim of every mackerel fisherman.  The best vessels generally maintain a position to the windward.  Mackerel mostly work to windward slowly, and those vessels furthest to windward in the fleet are therefore most likely to fall in with fish first, while from their position they can quickly run down should mackerel be raised to leeward.