in debt as not to want any time to spend their advance, but were
ready at the instant, and with this motley crew, (who, for aught
I knew, were robbers or pirates) I put to sea." The only sailor
of the lot was a Nantucket lad who was made mate and had to be
taught the rudiments of navigation while at sea. Of the others he
had this to say, in his lighthearted manner:

"The first of my fore-mast hands is a great, surly, crabbed,
raw-boned, ignorant Prussian who is so timid aloft that the mate
has frequently been obliged to do his duty there. I believe him
to be more of a soldier than a sailor, though he has often
assured me that he has been a boatswain's mate of a Dutch
Indiaman, which I do not believe as he hardly knows how to put
two ends of a rope together .... My cook . . . a good-natured
negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in the
smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding
onto something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact
that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might
be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a
specimen of the negro race . . . nor did I ever see such a
simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything and . . . he
can hardly tell the main-halliards from the mainstay.

"Next is an English boy of seventeen years old, who from having
lately had the small-pox is feeble and almost blind, a miserable
object, but pity for his misfortunes induces me to make his duty
as easy as possible. Finally I have a little ugly French boy, the
very image of a baboon, who from having served for some time on
different privateers has all the tricks of a veteran man-of-war's
man, though only thirteen years old, and by having been in an