"MINNESOTA" AND OTHER UNFORTUNATES 251 



to do so, for if a sailor despaired of decent treatment and ran 

 away from his ship, he forfeited his lay, which thus went to swell 

 the shares of the owners. 



''The masters of American merchantmen," says Nathaniel 

 Ames in his lively Mariner ^s Sketches, *' will seldom believe that a 

 man is sick till the agonies of death take place, it being the chief 

 cornerstone of their belief to look after their employers' inter- 

 est first and foremost, and rather to kill a man by hard work and 

 exposure, than to permit him to defraud the owners by his 

 untimely sickness. Besides, when a sailor dies, his arrears of 

 wages revert to the owners, who (I speak of New England 

 merchants) always contemplate the word 'dead' frequently 

 repeated in the return passage bill, with that peculiar satisfac- 

 tion only to be appreciated by those whose religious, moral, and 

 political creed is comprised in the maxim 'a penny saved is a 

 penny got.' 



" This theory is carried into more open practice by the masters 

 of the South Sea Whalers than any others. After a ship has 

 completed her cargo, and is preparing, in some of the ports on 

 the western coast of South America, for her passage round Cape 

 Horn, it is extremely fashionable for the masters, by tyrannical 

 usage and harassing duty, to compel the men to desert. This 

 practice is so notorious and so well understood, that it is quite 

 a question of course to ask the crew of a full ship, "Well, has 

 your skipper begun to cut any shines yet?'" 



Further, though the lays of whalemen shipping from the 

 home port were generally fixed by custom at what was re- 

 garded as a fair proportion, yet it was sometimes possible to 

 pick up men in foreign ports for ridiculously small wages. I 

 have seen in the New Bedford Custom House a paper issued 

 from the United States Consulate at St. Helena, which certified 

 that in 1849 a man shipped on board the whale-ship Triton 

 for the lordly wage of twenty cents a month. By replacing 

 deserters or discharged men with a crew paid at any such rate 

 as that, a whaling captain established, with ship-owners, a repu- 

 tation for thrift and shrewdness. Small wonder that sailors 

 found occasion to desert in foreign ports, or were driven to 



