Carpenters in American ships are, of course, super-excellent, but they are not so good at iron-work as a Scotchman. For a Scotch carpenter seems equally at home in handling wood or iron, as a result, I suppose, of the thorough training he receives while an apprentice. But in woodwork, in extensive repairs to a ship, the Yankee cannot be beaten. Indeed, he must needs be good, for otherwise he "would almost certainly find some of the officers who "would offer to teach him his trade. And in British North American ships a carpenter is not often carried, since nearly every Blue-nose sailor is a born worker in wood, and would consider the carrying of a carpenter a superfluous expense, quite unwarranted by any ship needs whatever. Although not strictly within the purview of the present work, I may be pardoned for paying a belated tribute to the excellence of the American carpenters carried in the whaleships. Their strong point was in boat-building; and to see what they could and did do with a batch of broken boats, some of them indeed with hardly any vestige of a boat remaining! Without any help, without rest for a couple of days and nights, except for necessary food, they would toil until they had again made it possible for the pursuit of the whale to be undertaken; and they had to work in such cramped quarters, not free from the all-pervading greasiness of trying out, that how they managed to do anything at all in workmanlike fashion was a mystery. One of them that I knew was also an artist in ivory and bone. He had a lathe of his own construction, and by its aid he turned out such exquisite pieces of ornamental work that they would not have been put to shame in any exhibition in the world. These ships also carried another artisan--the cooper--whose province it was to make casks, barrels, tubs, buckets, piggins; anything that could be made with hoops and staves. Consequently utensils that in other ships would have been of iron were in the whalers of wood, and I once heard our old cooper declare that he'd undertake to make a lady a pair of stays if he was favoured with the order. And I have no doubt that he would have done so, a pair that would have lasted a lifetime. No one on board would have had the slightest difficulty in believing that, given a sufficient number of trees and a little iron, these two worthies would have speedily constructed a ship, in case of our vessel's loss, in which we might have sailed round the world.