ir cause. He was an active, irritable,
fuming, vainglorious little man, and elevated in his own opinion, by
being the proxy of Mr. Astor. A violent altercation ensued, in the
course of which Thorn threatened to put the partners in irons should
they prove refractory; upon which M'Dougal seized a pistol and swore to
be the death of the captain should he ever offer such an indignity. It
was some time before the irritated parties could be pacified by the more
temperate bystanders.

Such was the captain's outset with the partners. Nor did the clerks
stand much higher in his good graces; indeed, he seems to have regarded
all the landsmen on board his ship as a kind of live lumber, continually
in the way. The poor voyageurs, too, continually irritated his spleen by
their "lubberly" and unseemly habits, so abhorrent to one accustomed
to the cleanliness of a man-of-war. These poor fresh-water sailors, so
vainglorious on shore, and almost amphibious when on lakes and rivers,
lost all heart and stomach the moment they were at sea. For days they
suffered the doleful rigors and retchings of sea-sickness, lurking below
in their berths in squalid state, or emerging now and then like spectres
from the hatchways, in capotes and blankets, with dirty nightcaps,
grizzly beard, lantern visage and unhappy eye, shivering about the deck,
and ever and anon crawling to the sides of the vessel, and offering up
their tributes to the windward, to infinite annoyance of the captain.

His letters to Mr. Astor, wherein he pours forth the bitterness of his
soul, and his seamanlike impatience of what he considers the "lubberly"
character and conduct of those around him, are before us, and are
amusingly characteristic. The honest captain is full of vexation on his
own account, and solicitude on account of Mr. Astor, whose property he
considers at the mercy of a most heterogeneous and wasteful crew.

As to the clerks, he pronounced them mere pretenders, not one of whom
had ever been among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than
Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a
billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he
emphatically sets down for "as foolish a pedant as ever lived."

Then as to the artisans and laborers who had been brought from Canada
and shipped at such expense, the three most respectable, according
to the captain's account, were culprits, who had fled from Canada on
account of