The most intelligent man forward is a New Yorker, Dick Broadhead, and, as he has been very willing to talk, we have had some interesting conversations. He is going out to ship in one of the Pacific mail steamers as quartermaster, which accounts for so respectable a young man’s signing in an American vessel. What a splendid lot of young, native Americans we would have in our merchant marine if boys at sea in our deep-water ships were treated as they are in the vessels of other nations! The real American sailor, as he has proved in our naval achievements, has no superior, and if even the mildest inducements were offered to young men of decent antecedents to sail in our ships, we would soon have a merchant service that would be the envy of the rest of the world. Look at the training-ship “St. Mary’s,” which is supposed to supply young men to officer our steamers and sailing ships. I have yet to meet with a single graduate of this excellent institution on a sailing vessel, for they absolutely refuse to sign in them even as second mate, saying that until blood and belaying-pins cease to fly in our long-voyage ships, they would leave them severely alone. The existing condition of things actually prevents our boys and young men from joining the merchant service. Why have we not a Plimsoll to strip our ships of the unprincipled wretches who command and officer them? Although not a sailor, this excellent man spent most of his life and ten thousand pounds in ameliorating the condition of English seamen. If our sailors were treated as they are in the foreign services, we should have gentlemen’s sons as captains and mates, as they have in Great Britain and Germany, and not the miserable examples of humanity that are to be found on the quarter-decks of the majority of our deep-water-men. The second mate of a ship once said to me, speaking of the captain of one of our crack San Francisco wind-jammers, “What! Cap’n B----? Why, he don’t know who his father and mother were.” If this is the captain, what can you expect? But I have drifted away from Broadhead. This is the second ship under the stars and stripes that he ever served in, having been shanghaied on board the “Virago” once two or three years before in a Chinese port. It was this ship’s maiden voyage, and she came home around South America from Hong-Kong, instead of around Africa. Concerning Captain Jones, Broadhead remarked, “I’ve seen dummies in command of ships, but he beats the deck. The first bad squall we had off the Horn, I was steering, and he was so scared he just held on to the rail and yelled, and I heard the mate say to him, ‘Why don’t you get the t’-ga’nt-s’ls off her?’ She went down to the sheer-poles in that squall, and they do say he hasn’t had anything above the topsails on her since. I’ll give you a tip: the ‘Virago’s’ got three masts too many for Cap’n Jones.” Latitude, 4° 24′ north; longitude, 119° 20′ west. +August 25+