Now, such a scene as that would be unthinkable on board of either an American ship or a "Blue-nose" (British North American vessel). There the traditions are all on the side of stern discipline, which is not based upon law, but upon force. The foremast hand, whoever he may be, that signs in an American ship realizes at once that it is dangerous to play any tricks with his superior officers. Because, although he does not reason it out, he feels that it would be useless to invoke the law to protect him against the certain consequences of shirking work, insolence, or laziness. And this leads me naturally to a consideration of the American skipper; that is to say, the skipper of the sailing ship, the man who, by dint of seamanship alone, has risen from the lowliest position to command. No better sailors ever lived than the masters of American ships; and it should never be forgotten, when the statistics of our marvellous Mercantile Marine are studied, that not so many years ago the American merchant navy was more than equal to our own. Not only so, but the shore population was also so deeply tinged with the maritime spirit that nautical terms were a part of the common speech of those who had never even seen the sea. It is hardly fair to use the past tense, because this is largely the case now; so much so, that a book bristling with nautical phrases will be read in America by both sexes with perfect ease, from their familiarity with nautical terminology. What sailor is there worth his salt who does not cherish proudly the remembrance of those magnificent "Down East" clipper ships and their wonderful passages to and from the Far East and San Francisco? Their doings have passed into proverbs, the runs they made from day to day, the mountainous press of canvas they carried and the smartness of their crews. Many of them were built by "rule of thumb," and were sailed also much in the same way, for their officers prided themselves far more upon their knowledge of sailorizing than mathematics, but they flew over the wide sea at a speed that our clumsier wooden vessels could not begin to compete with. In them the master was looked upon almost as a demigod. No man-o'-war's man to-day regards even an admiral with such awe as did the foremost hand of an American packet ship or China clipper the saturnine, deep-browed man who, in spotless raiment and with an Olympian air, strode up and down the weather side of his immaculate quarter-deck. And a man who had once made a voyage in such a flyer as the _Sovereign of the Seas_ or the _Dreadnought_ before the mast, was wont to brag of it loudly ever after. It conferred a sort of brevet rank upon an A.B. that he had successfully survived all the hardships of such a voyage.