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before, the unmistakable persons of these men would have removed them.
In the person of the master, the long, lean, angular-featured, hide-bound, weather-tanned Yankee skipper stood before me. Puritan, May-Flower, Plymouth Rock, were all written upon the well-known features.
No amount of English custom-house paper, or sealing-wax could, by any possibility, convert him into that rotund, florid, jocund Briton who personates the English shipmaster.
His speech was even more national—taking New England to be the Yankee nation —than his person; and when he opened his mouth, a mere novice might have sworn that he was from the ‘State of Maine’—there, or thereabouts.
When he told me that I ‘hadn't-ought-to’ burn his ship, he pronounced the shibboleth which condemned her to the flames.
The shrift was a short one.
When the papers were produced, I found among them no bill of sale or other evidence of the transfer of the property—the register of an English ship, as every seaman knows, not being such evidence.
His crew list, which had been very neatly prepared, was a mute but powerful witness against him. It was written, throughout, signatures and all in the same hand—the signatures all being as like as two peas.
After glancing at the papers, and making these mental observations as I went along, I asked the master a few questions.
As well as I recollect, he was from Hallowell, Maine.
His ship had been two years in the East Indies, trading from port to port; and, as before remarked, had only been transferred within a few days.
The freshly painted assumed name on her stern was scarcely dry. The master had sat with comparative composure during this examination, and questioning, evidently relying with great confidence upon his English flag and papers; but when I turned to him, and told him that I should burn his ship, he sprang from his chair, and said with excited manner and voice—‘You dare not do it, sir; that flag—suiting the action to the word, and pointing with his long, bony finger up the companion-way to the flag flying from his peak—won't stand it!’
‘Keep cool, captain,’ I replied, ‘the weather is warm, and as for the flag, I shall not ask it whether it will stand it or not—the flag that ought to be at your peak, will have to stand it, though’ In half
Baltimore, MD. Kelly Piet & Co. 1868.
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