heat sailors so much that
sailors might well be excused for poking fun at "Land-men" who were
seasick. Yet, at a time when even the best crews had no means of
keeping food and water properly, a land-lubber might also be excused
for being not only seasick but sick in worse ways still. The want of
fresh food always brought on scurvy; and the wonder is that any one
lived to tell the tale when once this plague and others got a foothold
in a ship.

But the Norse blood tingling in their veins, the manly love of
wonderful adventure, and, by no means least, the gamble of it, that
dared them to sail for strange outlandish parts with odds of five to
one against them, these, quite as much as the wish to make a fortune,
were the chief reasons why Sea-Dogs sailed from every port and made so
many landsmen mad to join them. And, after all, life afloat, rough as
it was, might well be better than life ashore, when men of spirit
wanted to be free from the troubles of taking sides with all the ups
and downs of kings and courts, rebels and religions.

Whether or not the man who wrote _The Complaynt of Scotland_ was only a
passenger or off to join the Sea-Dogs is more than we shall ever know;
for all he tells us is that he wrote his book in 1548, and that he was
then a landsman who "heard many words among the seamen, but knew not
what they meant." In any case, he is the only man who ever properly
described the daily work on board a Sea-Dog ship. The Sea-Dogs
themselves never bothered their heads about what they thought such a
very common thing; and whatever other landsmen wrote was always wrong.
A page of this quaint old book, which was not printed till two hundred
and fifty years after it was written, will show us how much the work
aboard a Sea-Dog ship was, in some ways, like the work aboard any other
sailing ship, even down to the present day; and yet how much unlike in
other ways. Some of the lingo has changed a good deal; for English
seamen soon began to drop the words King Henry's shipwrights brought
north from the Mediterranean. Many of these words were Italian, others
even Arabic; for the Arabs, Moors, and Turks haunted the Mediterranean
for many centuries, and some of their sea-words passed current into all
the northern tongues. We get _Captain_ from the Italian _Capitano_,
and _Admiral_ from the Arabic _Amir-al-bahr_, which means
Commander-of-the-sea.

"I shall report their crying and their call," says our author. "The