and mercenary man to insult and injure even neutral friends on
the ocean; and when he meets an honest sailor who may have all
his earnings on board his ship but who carries an enemy's flag,
he plunders him of every cent and leaves him the poor consolation
that it is done according to law . . . . When the Malay subjects
of Abba Thule cut down the cocoanut trees of an enemy, in the
spirit of private revenge, he asked them why they acted in
opposition to the principles on which they knew he always made
and conducted a war. They answered, and let the reason make us
humble, 'The English do so.'"

In his grand East Indiaman young Captain Delano traded on the
coast of India but soon came to grief. The enterprise had been
too large for him to swing with what cash and credit he could
muster, and the ship was sold from under him to pay her debts.
Again on the beach, with one solitary gold moidore in his purse,
he found a friendly American skipper who offered him a passage to
Philadelphia, which he accepted with the pious reflection that,
although his mind was wounded and mortified by the financial
disaster, his motives had been perfectly pure and honest. He
never saw his native land with so little pleasure as on this
return to it, he assures us, and the shore on which he would have
leaped with delight was covered with gloom and sadness.

Now what makes it so well worth while to sketch in brief outline
the careers of one and another of these bygone shipmasters is
that they accurately reflected the genius and the temper of their
generation. There was, in truth, no such word as failure in their
lexicon. It is this quality that appeals to us beyond all else.
Thrown on their beam ends, they were presently planning something