h each other that it is quite impossible to understand any
one of them without some reference to the other two.

Bluenose discipline was good, very good indeed. When the whole ship's
company was Bluenose discipline was partly instinctive and mostly went
well, as it generally did when Yankees and Bluenoses sailed together.
The whole population of the little home {98} port--men, women, and
children--knew every vessel's crew and all about them. The men were
farmers, fishermen, lumbermen, shipbuilders, and 'deepwatermen,' often
all in one. Among other peoples, only Scandinavians ever had such an
all-round lot as this. Even in the present century, with its
increasing multiformity of occupation, books full of nauticalities can
be read and understood in these countries by everybody, though such
books cannot be read elsewhere except by the seafaring few. Business
meant ships or shipping; so did politics, peace and war, adventure and
ambition.

But there is a different tale to tell when the tonnage outran the
Bluenose ability to man it, and Dutchmen, Dagos, miscellaneous
wharf-rats, and 'low-down' Britishers had to be taken on instead. If
the crew was mixed and the officers Bluenose there was sure to be
trouble of graduated kinds, all the way up from simple knock-downs to
the fiercest gun-play of a real hell ship. The food was inferior to
that aboard the Yankees. But in discipline there was nothing to
choose. An all-Bluenose or all-Yankee sometimes came as near the
perfection of seamanship and discipline as anything human possibly can.
But aboard a mixed Bluenose the rule of bend or break {99} was enforced
without the slightest reference to what was regarded as landlubber's
law. The Britisher's Board of Trade regulations were regarded with
contempt; and not without reason; for, excellent as they were, they
struck the Bluenose seamen as being an interference made solely in the
supposed interests of the men against the officers.

The mistake was that the old injustices were repeated in a new way.
Formerly the law either sided with the officers and owners or left them
alone; now it either sided with the men or left the officers and owners
in the lurch. The true balance was not restored. Here is a thoroughly
typical instance of the difference between a Britisher and a Bluenose
under the new dispensation. The second mate of a Britisher asked for
his discharge at Bombay because he could not manage the men, who had
shir