Another witness gave it as his opinion that “beam ends was almost an impossibility. He could not imagine a ship in such a position.” This is simply a landsman’s way of putting it because he gets it into his head that a ship has to be over to an angle of 90 degrees before she is beam ended. Seamen, however, think and say that a ship is on her beam ends when she lies down on her side till her deck assumes an angle of 45 or 50 degrees, and certainly that position is “beam ends” enough to satisfy the most fastidious man on board. When a ship is in the position I have described, it is much more easy to crawl about on the _outside_ of the weather bulwarks, than to crawl about the ship’s deck. By way of giving a clearer idea of “beam ends,” I may here relate a bit of my own experience. On one occasion I was in a splendid ship called the _Mary Ellen_, bound from the Clyde to Demerara. By the time we had been a week at sea, we were about 100 miles outside of Cape Clear, on the Irish Coast, and then got caught in a very heavy gale of head wind. For three days we lay hove to under the close reefed main topsail—a position in which some ships will ride comparatively dry, and skim the waves like a seagull—but for some reason or other our ship made what in nautical parlance is termed “very bad weather of it.” Strange as it may seem to landsmen, it is nevertheless true that ships are like men; you have to be acquainted with them for a considerable time, under all sorts of circumstances, before you get to know their good qualities and their bad ones. Experience alone can make you familiar with their little tricks, or ways, and then you are in a position to deal with them accordingly.