“We shall never do any good upon the ocean until we have hanged the dockyard contractors,” he cried. “I’d have a dead dockyard contractor as a figure-head for every first-rate in the fleet, and a provision dealer for every frigate. I know them with their puttied seams and their devil bolts, risking five hundred lives that they may steal a few pounds’ worth of copper. What became of the _Chance_, and of the _Martin_, and of the _Orestes_? They foundered at sea, and were never heard of more, and I say that the crews of them were murdered men.” Lord Cochrane seemed to be expressing the views of all, for a murmur of assent, with a mutter of hearty, deep-sea curses, ran round the circle. “Those rascals over yonder manage things better,” said an old one-eyed captain, with the blue-and-white riband for St. Vincent peeping out of his third buttonhole. “They sheer away their heads if they get up to any foolery. Did ever a vessel come out of Toulon as my 38-gun frigate did from Plymouth last year, with her masts rolling about until her shrouds were like iron bars on one side and hanging in festoons upon the other? The meanest sloop that ever sailed out of France would have overmatched her, and then it would be on me, and not on this Devonport bungler, that a court-martial would be called.” They loved to grumble, those old salts, for as soon as one had shot off his grievance his neighbour would follow with another, each more bitter than the last. “Look at our sails!” cried Captain Foley. “Put a French and a British ship at anchor together, and how can you tell which is which?” “Frenchy has his fore and maintop-gallant masts about equal,” said my father. “In the old ships, maybe, but how many of the new are laid down on the French model? No, there’s no way of telling them at anchor. But let them hoist sail, and how d’you tell them then?” “Frenchy has white sails,” cried several. “And ours are black and rotten. That’s the difference. No wonder they outsail us when the wind can blow through our canvas.” “In the _Speedy_,” said Cochrane, “the sailcloth was so thin that, when I made my observation, I always took my meridian through the foretopsail and my horizon through the foresail.”