never picked up a book of his without lighting upon some
hideous act of piracy, some astounding and unparalleled shipwreck, some
marvellous island of treasure. This writer, of a clan numerous as
Wordsworth's 'little lot of stars,' warned me off and affrighted me. His
paper ship had so long and successfully filled the public eye that I
shrank from launching anything real, anything with strakes and
treenails, anything with running rigging so leading that a sailor would
exactly know what to let go when the order was given. In plain English,
I judged that the sea story had been irremediably depressed, and
rendered wholly ridiculous by the strenuous periodic and Christmas
labours of the Writer for Boys. Had he not sunk even Marryat and Michael
Scott, who, because they wrote about the sea, were compelled in due
course by the publishers to address themselves exclusively to boys! The
late George Cupples--a man of fine genius--in the course of a letter to
me, complained warmly of being made to figure as 'Captain' George
Cupples upon the title-page of his admirable work, 'The Green Hand.' He
assured me that he was no captain, and that his name thus written was
merely a bookseller's dodge to recommend his story to boys.

And, still, I would sometimes think that if I would but take heart and
go afloat in imagination, under the old red flag, I should find within
the circle of the horizon such materials for a book as might recommend
it, at all events on the score of freshness. Only two writers had dealt
with the mercantile side of the ocean life--Dana, the author of 'Two
Years before the Mast,' and Herman Melville, both of them, it is
needless to say, Americans. I could not recollect a book, written by an
Englishman, relating, as a work of fiction, to shipboard life on the
high seas under the flag of the Merchant Service. I excluded the Writer
for Boys. I could recall no author who, himself a practical seaman, one
who had slept with sailors, eaten with them, gone aloft with them, and
suffered with them, had produced a book, a novel--call it what you
will--wholly based on what I may term the inner life of the forecastle
and the cabin.

[Illustration: SOME OF THE CREW]

[Illustration: THE MAGISTRATES]

It chanced one day that a big ship, with a mastheaded colour, telling
of trouble on board, let go her anchor in the Downs. I then lived in a
town which overlooks those waters. The crew of the ship had mutinied:
they had carried the