h forty. The British excuse was that East
Indiamen required a fighting crew as well as a trading one, and that
British vessels were built to last, not simply put together to make one
flashy record. But after the Napoleonic wars the British Navy could
police the world of waters; so double numbers were no longer needed;
and if East {96} Indiamen were built to last, how was it they only went
an average of six times out and six times home before being broken up?

Nor was it only in speed that the Yankees were so far ahead. They paid
better wages, they gave immeasurably better food, they were smarter to
look at and smarter to go, their rigging was tauter, their sails better
cut and ever so much flatter on a wind, their cargo more quickly and
scientifically stowed, and, most important point of all, their
discipline quite excellent. Woe betide the cook or steward whose
galley or saloon had a speck of dirt that would make a smudge on the
skipper's cleanest cambric handkerchief! It was the same all through,
from stem to stern and keel to truck, from foremast hand to skipper.
Aboard the best clippers the system was well-nigh perfect. Each man
had found, or had the chance of finding, the position for which he was
most fit. The best human combination of head and heart and hand was
sure to come to the top. The others would also find their own
appropriate levels. But shirkers, growlers, flinchers, and mutineers
were given short shrift. The officers were game to the death and never
hesitated to use handspikes, fists, or firearms whenever the occasion
required it. {97} As for sea-lawyers--the canting equivalent of
ranting demagogues ashore--they could hardly have got a hearing among
any first-rate crew. No admiralissimo ever was a greater hero to a
junior midshipman than the best Yankee skippers were to the men before
the mast. There's no equalitarian nonsense out at sea.

This digression springs from and returns to the main argument; because
the Yankee excellence is so little understood and sometimes so
grudgingly acknowledged by British and foreign landsmen, and because
Bluenose and Yankee circumstances and practice were so much alike.
Britishers were different in nearly all their natural circumstances,
while, to increase the difference, their practice became greatly
modified by a deal of good but sometimes rather lubberly legislation.
And yet all three--Britisher, Bluenose, and Yankee--are so inextricably
connected wit