And now we have come to the first piece of inhumanity or gross cruelty of which either of us has been a witness on board. What we saw before was not much out of the way, except in regard to the bad language and the general atmosphere of “toughness” that pervaded the encounters; but even they were nothing to speak of when the character of the mates on American sailing ships is taken into consideration. That which I saw this afternoon, though, went far beyond hazing, for it assumed the form of full-fledged brutality. I want to begin at the commencement, so as to bring the whole affair to light and allow the reader to judge for himself. The actors in the little drama which just escaped being a tragedy were Mr. Rarx and the Finn, Karl Karlsen. This fellow is slow and thick-headed, with a very hazy idea of English, but is always one of the first to jump if he understands the order. He was told this afternoon at about three o’clock to overhaul a certain tackle, one block of which was belayed to a pin in the rail, while the second mate stood by, having in his hand another massive block of a threefold purchase. The captain was below asleep, and I was standing at the forward end of the poop, not twenty feet from Karl. Suddenly Mr. Rarx, who was in a very bad humor, as I could see, walked close up to Karl and picked up a small coil of rope from the deck, and yelling, “You ain’t doin’ that right, d---- you,” made as though he were going to hit him. The man at once set about the job in another way; but the second mate’s temper was so ungovernable that he stepped up to Karl with an expression in his eyes which I never saw before in any man’s, gave him a terrific kick with his “letter-carrier” boots, and as the luckless fellow swung round under the shock and impetus, Rarx drew back the ponderous block which he still held, and which must have weighed nearly fifteen pounds, and flung it full against the sailor’s face. I could hear the thud distinctly, while with a sharp cry the big, powerful man reeled across the deck and would have fallen prone had it not been for the main fife-rail, against which he sunk gradually down, the blood pouring from a wide gash in his nose and forehead, and rapidly forming a little pond on the deck, while a crimson track stretched from where he crouched to the second mate, who stood over by the rail with the block raised above his head, as though challenging any other of the men hard by to take up the row. Half the watch saw the affair, and if looks could have annihilated him, Rarx would have dropped dead on the spot; and I saw Broadhead and the Frenchman, who were putting an eye-splice into the end of a wire rope, flush crimson and bend hard over their work at this miserable act of cruelty.