But before the East India Company had offices in the Blackwall yard and superintended the building of its ships, they had a yard of their own at Deptford. This dates from the year 1607, where they soon found employment for five hundred carpenters, caulkers, joiners, and others. Here there existed a wonderful organisation; large stocks of timber, masts, yards, canvas, and other stores. There were such officials as the ship’s husband, the clerk of the stores, the buyers, the clerk of the yard, the master shipwright, the master pilot (who had to survey the ships both here and at Blackwall), the boatswain-general, treasurers, purser-general, the clerk of the cordage, the surgeon-general, clerk of the slaughter-house (to look after the victuals), and so on. It was a hive of great activity, and by the year 1621 they had built so many ships that the company owned 10,000 tons of shipping. They had exported from England in their vessels £319,211 worth of woollen goods, lead, iron, tin and other commodities, and had brought home from the East £875,288 worth of cargoes, which were sold in England for the immense sum of £2,044,600. The average profit made by the first twelve voyages amounted to not less than 138 per cent. But after leasing the Deptford yard for twenty years, it was found to be so costly that it swallowed up too much of the capital, which could be employed more profitably in hiring ships. Therefore the Blackwall yard became responsible for the building of practically all the East Indiamen. The company went on from prosperity to wealth. In 1681 they owned thirty-five ships of from 100 to 775 tons, and two years later a £100 share would sell for £500. In 1667 was imported the first cargo of tea, which in the nineteenth century was to be the means of bringing into existence those wonderful tea-clippers. And now let us see something of the kind of existence which the merchant sailor led during the seventeenth century. He and his mode of life were regarded by the landsman as something strange, something abnormal. Contrariwise, the sailor realised that his art was almost beyond the landsman’s comprehension. That spirit, even in this twentieth century, is anything but dead, and between the two avocations there must always exist a big gulf. But we have to remember that in the seventeenth century seafaring was still such a modern and rare career (though yearly increasing in popularity) that he who made a profession of it was an unusual being. “The sea language,” wrote the seventeenth-century Sir William Monson in his _Naval Tracts_, “is not soon learned, much less understood ... a boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred on it so sick, that it bereaves him of legs and stomach and courage ... when he hears the seamen cry starboard, or port, or to bide alooff, or flat a sheet, or haul home a cluling, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech, which he conceives not the meaning of.”