and, as he said himself, had owned ships, built ships, and sailed ships.  His boat’s crew were a pretty raw set, just out of the bush, and, as the sailor’s phrase is, ``hadn’t got the hayseed out of their hair.’’ Captain Terry convinced our captain that our reckoning was a little out, and, having spent the day on board, put off in his boat at sunset for his ship, which was now six or eight miles astern.  He began a ``yarn’’ when he came aboard, which lasted, with but little intermission, for four hours.  It was all about himself, and the Peruvian government, and the Dublin frigate, and her captain, Lord James Townshend, and President Jackson, and the ship Ann M’Kim, of Baltimore.  It would probably never have come to an end, had not a good breeze sprung up, which sent him off to his own vessel.  One of the lads who came in his boat, a thoroughly countrified-looking fellow, seemed to care very little about the vessel, rigging, or anything else, but went round looking at the live stock, and leaned over the pigsty, and said he wished he was back again tending his father’s pigs.

A curious case of dignity occurred here.  It seems that in a whale-ship there is an intermediate class, called boat-steerers.  One of them came in Captain Terry’s boat, but we thought he was cockswain of the boat, and a cockswain is only a sailor.  In the whaler, the boat-steerers are between the officers and crew, a sort of petty officers; keep by themselves in the waist, sleep amidships, and eat by themselves, either at a separate table, or at the cabin table, after the captain and mates are done.  Of all this hierarchy we were entirely ignorant, so the poor boat-steerer was left to himself.  The second mate would not notice him, and seemed surprised at his keeping amidships, but his pride of office would not allow him to go forward.  With dinner-time came the experimentum crucis.  What would he do?  The second mate went to the second table without asking him.  There was nothing for him but famine or humiliation.  We asked him into the forecastle, but he faintly declined.  The whale-boat’s crew explained it to us, and we asked him again.  Hunger got the victory over pride of rank, and his boat-steering majesty had to take his grub out of our kid, and eat with his jack-knife.  Yet the man was ill at ease all the time, was sparing of his conversation, and kept up the notion of a condescension under stress of circumstances.  One would say that, instead of a tendency to equality in human beings, the tendency is to make the most of inequalities, natural or artificial.

At eight o’clock we altered our course to the northward, bound for Juan Fernandez.