When they catch these shore-lubbers at sea, the sailors’ contempt for them is very manifest. They are delighted when they are sea-sick, oaths and blows are freely dealt to them, they take pleasure in provoking their aversion to slush and tar, and secretly enjoy their cruel treatment by the mates. As they made me feel my inferiority to Harry, I have since witnessed many another treated in the same way. Poor brutes! considering the slave life they lead, it would be a pity to deprive them of this miserable consolation. The discipline of the ‘Windermere’ was well begun by the time I regained health. It was the pride of the officers that, though the ‘Windermere’ was not a ‘Black-Ball’ packet, she was big and smart enough to be one, and they were resolved that the customs of the Black-Baller should prevail on board, and that the discipline should be of the same quality. Whether it came up to the regulation standard I do not know, but just as Francis flogged, beat, and pummelled the infants under his charge, so the ruffian mates stormed, swore, and struck or booted the full-grown wretches on board the ‘Windermere.’ The captain was too high and mighty to interfere, or he may have issued his orders to that purpose, and was satisfied with the zealous service of his mates: at any rate, I scarcely heard his voice except during gales of wind, and then it was stern and strident. Strange to say, the majority of the sailors preferred the American ships, with all their brutality, to the English, with their daily doses of lime-juice. Harry, Long Hart, and the forecastle arguments which we had perforce to hear, as our den adjoined that of the sailors, sufficiently informed me of the fact that the soft-tack, plum-duff, good mess of beef of the Yankees, were preferred to the weevilly-biscuit, horse-beef, and gill of lime-juice of the British. ‘Give me,’ said a forecastle orator, ‘a Yankee ship, and not a lousy lime-juicer. Even on the worst Yankee ship afloat no bucco sailor need fear the mates. If a man knows his duty and won’t shirk, he is safe against the devil himself, I say. Watch Bully Waters himself. He never drops on a real shell-back, but on some infernal land-lubber who has shipped as an A. B., when he is not fit to carry guts to a bear. It is the loutish Dutchmen and Swedes who have spoiled these packet-ships. You can’t expect mates, in a squall of wind that may whip the masts off, to stand still until their orders enter the stupid head of a Dutchman who doesn’t know a word of English. Well, what must they do? The ship is their first duty, and they fly at the Dutchman, and if the Dutchman don’t understand that he must skip--he must stand and be skinned. There’s my sentiments.’ I heard such defence scores of times, which proves that the worst side has something to say for itself.