This was quite in accordance with the practice all along the coast of North America. Even aboard the famous Black Ball Line of Yankee transatlantic packets in the forties there was plenty of 'handspike hash' and 'belaying-pin soup' for shirkers or mutineers. The men before the mast were mostly foreigners and riff-raff Britishers; very few were Yankees or Bluenoses. Discipline had to be maintained; and it was maintained by force. But these were not the real hell ships. 'Hell ships' were commonest among deepwatermen on long voyages round the Horn, or among the whalers when the best class of foremast hands were not to be had. Many of them are much more recent than is generally known; and even now they are not quite extinct. 'Black Taylor,' 'Devil Summers,' and 'Hell-fire {95} Slocum' are well within living memory. Black Taylor came to a befitting end. Because the rope surged at the capstan he kicked the nearest man down, and was jumping to stamp his ribs in, when the man suddenly whipped out his knife and ripped Black Taylor up with a New Orleans nigger trick-twist for which he got six months, though really deserving none. But such mates and skippers always were exceptions; and, as a general rule, no better crews and vessels have ever sailed the sea than the Yankees at their prime. Their splendid clippers successfully challenged the slower Britishers on every trade route in the world. At the very time that the _America_ was beating British yachts hull-down, the old British East Indiamen were still wallowing along with eighty hands to a thousand tons, while a Yankee thousand-tonner could sail them out of sight with 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?