more than moral persuasion to carry on the work of the ship. Owen had been in the habit of carrying a shooting-iron, and had found it useful to encourage the belief that he had been schooled as a Yankee mate, but a pistol never seemed to me to be a necessary precaution. In connection with the employment of physical force on board ship I and others were quite recently greatly amused by the experiences of a captain of one of the Irrawaddy flotilla steamers, recounted as follows: “The best peacemaker you can have is a sandbag about a foot long and an inch thick; I and my mate and engineer have one, and we never find it beyond us to clear the deck of a crowd.” I should think it would be better than a belaying-pin, which is at times an awkward thing to carry in your sea boot. Be that as it may I found that practically everything was left in my hands on board the _Basuto_, and that suited me excellently. We spent our time between Cape Town and Zanzibar; there was no use hurrying, for the ship could only go a certain pace, and if we missed one mail we were in time for the next one, but nothing possible was spared to do our work well. We were fortunate in having as second officer a man I had the greatest respect for as a seaman, E. T. Jones, and further I found by practical experience that he was a good man in an emergency, and was to be absolutely relied upon. When in Natal we had the use of a large ship’s boat belonging to the Company, rigged as a cutter. It was a sight to see Jones sail her single-handed, but then he had served his time with the Trinity House. For some reason it had been decided that Captain Ker should leave Southampton as marine superintendent, and reside at Cape Town as manager of the Company in South Africa. When he arrived in Cape Town he found the _Basuto_ after a refit, looking very spick-and-span, and I suppose conceived the idea that that was her usual condition, which was bad luck for me. There had never been any great cordiality between us and there was to be less in future, for try as I might there was always something wrong about my ship in his view, and he resented, I think, meeting officers at houses where he visited, especially as ladies do not always pay that deference to superior position to which its owner may think himself entitled. But be that as it may the fact remains that there was no love lost between us.