From Trieste, Constantinople, and Alexandria, reports nearly the same were sent in. Nor were those from our consuls resident in the United States of a more favourable character. “It was but last week,” remarked Mr. Sherrard, writing from Portland, 27th July, 1843, “that I had occasion to take upon myself the risk of sending back to New Brunswick a vessel, whose master, after disposing of her cargo and receiving the proceeds, squandered the whole in liquor, leaving his crew without their wages and the vessel without sea stores.” He mentioned, also, the instance of another, a British barque, from England for St. John’s, Newfoundland, which was boarded by a revenue cutter, the whole crew, including master and mate, being in a helpless state of intoxication, and the vessel drifting about embayed in a dangerous place near Mount Desert. From Baltimore the consul, Mr. MacTavish, wrote that, with few exceptions, “almost all the masters of English merchantmen which have arrived here from British ports in my time appear to me incompetent, arising chiefly from inebriety; but, with regard to colonial vessels, I am happy to say that my experience has been the reverse of the foregoing; the temperance principle is becoming very general on board of them, and a manifest improvement is in progress from that cause;” he added, in reply to questions about the conduct of masters of Hanseatic ships frequenting Baltimore, that, in his thirteen years’ experience, he had heard of but one master of a vessel being a drunkard, and he was at once removed. “They are,” he said, “invariably competent navigators and good scholars, many of them belonging to respectable families in Bremen; and most abstemious, the principal beverage used in the cabin being light-bodied claret and vin de grave.” Of the British shipmasters frequenting Baltimore he wrote in very disparaging terms, asserting them to be, in point of intelligence, address, and conduct, greatly inferior to the shipmasters of either Bremen or America. [Sidenote: Mr. Consul Hesketh.] Mr. Hesketh, writing from Rio de Janeiro, states that, during an active service of more than thirty years as consul at that port, he had experienced unwearied trouble and much anxiety, in consequence of the intemperate habits of the masters and crews of British merchant vessels, and that cases were not uncommon in which it had been found absolutely necessary to take from on board all intoxicating liquors. With regard to their competency in other respects, he said: “I have come to the conclusion that British shipmasters are frequently entrusted with commands on voyages requiring more knowledge of the scientific department of navigation than they possess;” he added, however, that the masters of large or first-class merchant vessels were generally fully competent for their duties. [Sidenote: Reports from the Consuls in South America.]