rty dollars a-month, as
to stand and be fired at a shilling a day. The circumstance of so many
of my own men being in American ships, and their assertion that there
were no other sailors than English at New York, induced me to enter very
minutely into my investigation, of which the following are the
results:--

The United States, correctly speaking, have no common seamen, or seamen
bred up as apprentices before the mast. Indeed a little reflection will
show how unlikely it is that they ever should have; for who would submit
to such a dog's life (as at the best it is), or what parent would
consent that his children should wear out an existence of hardship and
dependence at sea, when he could so easily render them independent on
shore? The same period of time requisite for a man to learn his duty ay
an able seaman, and be qualified for the pittance of eighteen dollars
per month, would be sufficient to establish a young man as an
independent, or even wealthy, land-owner, factor, or merchant. That
there are classes in America who do go to sea is certain, and who and
what these are I shall hereafter point out; but it may be positively
asserted that, unless by escaping from their parents at an early age,
and before their education is complete, they become, as it were, lost,
there is in the United States of America hardly an instance of a white
boy being sent to sea, to be brought up as a foremast man.

It may be here observed that there is a wide difference in the
appearance of an English seaman and a portion of those styling
themselves American seamen, who are to be seen at Liverpool and other
seaports; tall, weedy, narrow-shouldered, slovenly, yet still athletic
men, with their knives worn in a sheath outside of their clothes, and
not with a lanyard round them, as is the usual custom of English seamen.
There is, I grant, a great difference in their appearance, and it
arises from the circumstance of those men having been continually in the
trade to New Orleans and the South, where they have picked up the
buccaneer airs and customs which are still in existence there; but the
fact is, that, though altered also by climate, the majority of them were
Englishmen born, who served their first apprenticeship in the coasting
trade, but left it at an early age for America. They may be considered
as a portion of the emigrants to America, having become in feeling, as
well as in other respects, _bona fide_ Americans.

The whole am